Desktop transformation initiatives promise significant cost savings and increased agility. Whether you deploy Citrix XenApp or XenDesktop, users expect application delivery to be as fast and reliable as their physical desktop experience.

Join Citrix and eG Innovations to learn about Citrix performance assurance and how to deliver Citrix desktop transformation success and ROI. Learn how to proactively manage service performance so you can make informed IT operations decisions, move from insight to action, and quickly resolve the root cause of service performance issues.

In this webinar you will see and learn how to:

• Build performance assurance into your desktop transformation architecture from the beginning, rather than as an after-thought, after you have performance issues
• Dramatically accelerate diagnosis and resolution of user experience issues anywhere in the desktop service environment – before they impact customer satisfaction
• Right-size the environment for maximum ROI and performance assurance
• Deliver on the ROI and user experience promise of desktop transformation initiatives

DETAILS

Webinar: Performance Assurance – A Key to Citrix Desktop Transformation Success and ROI

When: February 29th, 2012 @ 1:00pm EST | 10:00 am PST | 7:00 pm CET

Hosted By: Citrix Systems, Inc.

Register Now: http://community.citrix.com/p/citrix-ready-webinar-eginnovations?pcode=eg

Speakers:
Craig Ellrod, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, Citrix Systems
Srinivas Ramanathan, CEO and Founder, eG Innovations (http://www.eginnovations.com)

We look forward to seeing you at the Citrix webinar!

eG Innovations released the 2012 performance survey report “Performance Management in Transformational IT Environments” – Download here: www.eginnovations.com/survey2012

We asked over 150 IT operations professionals in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific about their performance management preferences and thoughts. The survey results show that companies are having a hard time keeping up with the performance management requirements of virtualized IT infrastructures. Transformational IT technologies like virtualization and cloud computing are changing the way IT services are provisioned and delivered.

While these transformational IT technologies offer significant operational and cost benefits, they also make management of business services much more complex and challenging because of the dynamic nature of the infrastructure. IT operations expect that management systems for their virtualized infrastructure be as automated, agile and easy to use as the virtualized infrastructure itself.

Here are the key survey findings:

• IT operations professionals struggle to manually diagnose root cause problems in heterogeneous service environments – 54% of IT professionals surveyed said their single biggest performance management challenge is identifying the root cause of slow application performance in such heterogeneous environments. IT operations staff can’t tell where the root of the problem is when a user says performance is “slow”: Is it the Network? Server? Database? Virtual Machine? Today’s manual approach to troubleshooting performance issues is woefully inadequate in dealing with the complexity of transformational IT environments. In response, a majority of 67% would like to see performance management solutions that help them automate and accelerate the diagnosis and resolution of performance issues in heterogeneous service environments.
• Managing virtual and physical machines is a challenge – A very high percentage of respondents (53%) are looking for solutions that can manage performance of both virtual and physical machines, as well as the applications running on them, reflecting the new dynamics and inter-dependencies introduced by virtualization layers of IT environments.
• IT wants integrated performance monitoring across all infrastructure tiers – 60% of respondents say they are using multiple, independent performance monitoring tools today – one for the network, another for servers, another for the database and one for the virtualization tier. This fragmented silo approach does not work anymore, and an overwhelming 66% say they are looking for comprehensive solutions that provide answers to cross-layer performance issues.
• Poor service performance impacts customer satisfaction – The #1 business impact of poor IT service performance is decreased customer satisfaction say 53% of respondents. Decreased user productivity (44%) and an increase of IT operations cost (44%) as a result of IT performance issues are of major concern among IT operations professionals.
• IT operations professionals are looking for proactive problem solving – 63% of respondents are looking for performance management solutions that allow them to become more proactive and find problems before they impact the user experience.

Download the full report now: www.eginnovations.com/survey2012

We hope you’ll enjoy the report!

In part 1 of this article, we talked about how the current VDI deployment cycle is broken, often overlooking the new inter-dependencies and performance implications introduced by desktop virtualziation. To ensure VDI success, performance has to be considered at every stage of the VDI lifecycle because it is fundamental to the success or failure of the VDI rollout.

Understanding the performance requirements of desktops will also help plan the virtual desktop infrastructure more efficiently. For example, known heavy CPU using desktop users can be load balanced across servers. Likewise, by planning to assign a good mix of CPU intensive and memory intensive user desktops are assigned to a physical server, it is possible to get optimal usage of the existing hardware resources.

Taking this discussion one step further, it is interesting to draw a parallel with how server virtualization evolved and to see what lessons we can learn as far as VDI is concerned.

A lot of the emphasis in the early days was on determining which applications could be virtualized and which ones could not. Today, server virtualization technology has evolved to a point where there are more virtual machines being deployed in a year than physical machines, and almost every application server (except very old legacy ones) are virtualized fairly well. You no longer hear anyone asking whether this application server can be virtualized or not. From focusing on the hypervisor, virtualization vendors have realized that performance and manageability are key to the success of server virtualization deployments.

VDI deployments could be done more rapidly and more successfully if we learn our lessons from how server virtualization evolved. VDI assessment needs to expand in focus on just the desktop and look at the entire infrastructure. Attention during VDI rollouts has to be paid to performance management and assurance. To avoid a lot of rework and problem remediation down the line, performance assurance must be considered early on in the process and at every stage. This is key to getting VDI deployed on a bigger scale and faster, with great return on investment (ROI).

To learn more about VDI performance, join the on-demand webinar “Top-5 Best Practices for Virtual Desktop Success“

Very often, when an enterprise starts on the virtual desktop journey, the focus is on the user desktop. This is only natural – after all, it is the desktop that is moving – from being on a physical system to a virtual machine.

Therefore, once a decision to try out VDI is made, the primary focus is to benchmark the performance of physical desktops, model their usage, predict the virtualized user experience and based on the results, determine which desktops can be virtualized and which can’t. This is what many people refer to as “VDI assessment”.

One of the fundamental changes with VDI is that the desktops no longer have dedicated resources. They share the resources of the physical machine on which they are hosted and they may even be using a common storage subsystem.

While resource sharing provides several benefits, it also introduces new complications. A single malfunctioning desktop can take so much resources that it impacts the performance of all the other desktops. Whereas in the physical world, the impact of a failure or a slowdown was minimal (if a physical desktop failed, it would impact only one user), the impact of failure or slowdown in the virtual world is much more severe (one failure can impact hundreds of desktops). Therefore, even in the VDI assessment phase, it is important to take performance considerations into account.

In fact, performance has to be considered at every stage of the VDI lifecycle because it is fundamental to the success or failure of the VDI rollout. The new types of inter-desktop dependencies that exist in VDI have to be accounted for at every stage.

For example, in many of the early VDI deployments, administrators found that when they just migrated the physical desktops to VDI, backups or antivirus software became a problem. These software components were scheduled to run at the same time on all the desktops. When the desktops were physical, it didn’t matter, because each desktop had dedicated hardware. With VDI, the synchronized demand for resources from all the desktops severely impacted the performance of the virtual desktops. This was not something that was anticipated because the focus of most designs and plans was on the individual desktops.

In part 2 of this article, we will take a closer look at the parallels to server virtualization and what lessons we can learn for VDI.

Mark your calendar for the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Online Event on January 18 beginning at noon ET (9 a.m PT). Visit our virtual booth at this online event and discuss with us how to maximize service performance and user productivity, and thereby deliver on the ROI promise of transformational IT initiatives.

Learn more about the eG Enterprise performance management solution featuring the industry’s only virtualization-aware service topology mapping and automatic correlation technology. This unique capability allows administrators to monitor RHEV server and desktop platforms – not as a silo but as an integral component of the overall business service infrastructure. This approach delivers deep, actionable insights into the true causes of cross-domain service performance issues and enables administrators to pre-emptively detect, diagnose, and fix root-cause issues – before end users notice.

During the live expo (starting at 9 am ET) you can ask your questions directly to the eG Innovations team and you’ll also be able to interact with the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization experts, partners and other attendees participating in the online event.

We look forward to seeing you at the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Virtual Event!

Register now: https://vts.inxpo.com/Launch/QReg.htm?ShowKey=7670

We are excited to announce our partnership with 2X Software, a provider of server based and virtual computing solutions. 2X Software selected eG Innovations to offer best-of-breed monitoring and performance management capabilities for 2X ApplicationServer XG environments. This allows 2X customers to identify and repair performance issues pre-emptively, before they impact business continuity and user satisfaction.

A growing number of administrators are relying on 2X ApplicationServer XG for quick and reliable virtual desktop and application delivery. Performance failures often have a terrible effect on user experience and organizational effectiveness. Many times, the cause of such failures cannot be easily pinpointed, especially in dynamic virtualized environments, making recovery difficult.

eG 2X Monitoring provides total performance visibility for 2X installations of all sizes, providing a comprehensive management solution for 2X farms, with complete visibility and monitoring for all layers and tiers of the organization’s 2X infrastructure. Monitored layers include the network, servers, virtualization platform, storage and more. With eG 2X Monitoring, administrators can dramatically accelerate the discovery, diagnosis and resolution of performance issues to improve the end-user experience within virtual, cloud and physical infrastructures.

eG 2X Monitoring improves the monitoring and visibility of 2X environments in multiple ways:

• Total Performance Visibility – Each service layer and tier is monitored – from desktops to applications, and from the network to storage – so administrators know what’s working and what isn’t.
• Proactive Issue Detection and Resolution – Allows 2X environment performance to be auto-baselined, sending proactive alerts when infrastructure usage and performance are abnormal; and administrators can automatically correlate performance events across the service environment, and identify and diagnose issues before users call the helpdesk.
• User Session and Application Performance Diagnosis – In-depth user session visibility allows administrators to diagnose abnormal user sessions and misbehaving applications.
• Powerful Reporting & Analytics – Pinpoint performance bottlenecks in 2X environments, identify excessive users, and load intensive applications – helping you to right-size your IT environment and get better return out of your IT investments.

For more information, please download the eG 2X Monitoring Solution Brief .

The UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) has published a case study on our recent expansion and success in the UK. UKTI was a great help to us as we established our new presence in the UK. The case study is available here >>>

Take the 5-minute survey on Performance Management & Monitoring trends and get a free copy of the survey report: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/performancesurvey2012

This report will help you understand what your peers think about performance management and where the market is going. It will also help eG Innovations deliver better products to you. The aggregated survey results are anonymous.

We would like to invite you to our upcoming live VDI Webinar “Top-5 Best Practices for Virtual Desktop Success” (presented by the 451 Group and eG Innovations). The webinar will focus on how to deliver VDI performance assurance, user satisfaction, and ROI.

Date & Time: November 30, 2011 @ 2:00 pm ET (New York) | 11:00 am PT (San Francisco) | 7:00 pm GMT (London) | 8:00 pm CET (Berlin)
Register here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/981881313

Virtual desktop and VDI initiatives promise a variety of benefits – but the underlying IT architecture adds significant complexity and risk. Virtual desktop users expect application delivery to be as fast and reliable as their physical desktop experience. A single failure in the service infrastructure can bring virtual desktop performance to a crawl, and significantly impact user productivity and business processes. And when a user calls about “slow applications”, how do you discover and quickly fix the true service performance bottleneck: Is it the network? Profile server? Web? Desktop Virtualization platform? Storage?

Join this webinar (https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/981881313) and learn from desktop transformation experts Karin Kelley (451 Group) and Srinivas Ramanathan (eG Innovations) about the top-5 best practices on how to build scalable performance assurance into virtual desktop environments, and how to provide end-to-end performance visibility across every layer and every tier of dynamic service infrastructures – from virtual desktops to applications, and from the network to storage. Learn how to proactively manage service performance so you can make informed IT operations decisions, move from insight to action, and quickly resolve the root cause of service performance issues – before they impact user productivity and the success of your desktop transformation initiative.

Our last webinar had over 1,800 registrations, and we expect this VDI webinar to be as popular – so make sure to register early and reserve your seat now: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/981881313

We look forward to seeing you at the webinar!

We’re excited that IO Integration, a leading systems integrator specializing in asset management tools and workflow solutions, has selected eG Enterprise as the performance management platform for its new IO Monitor remote monitoring service.

Bill Covington, COO of IO Integration said, “We have evaluated all major performance management solutions and were truly impressed with eG Innovations’ ability to proactively pinpoint performance issues across multiple mission-critical systems, whether they are physical, virtualized or cloud based, and do so before issues impact user productivity and ROI. Our new IO Monitor service now offers true 24x7x365 support and offers total performance visibility across every layer of every tier of our client’s IT infrastructure.”

IO Integration uses eG Enterprise to enable its clients to keep their mission-critical business services running at peak performance, and to deliver tangible ROI to clients undertaking transformational IT initiatives.

This partnership allows IO Integration to expand the range of services offered to clients to include advanced remote performance management, analysis, and reporting of mission-critical systems. It will dramatically accelerate the discovery, diagnosis, and resolution of service performance and user experience issues.