• Overview
• VDI Performance Best Practices
• VDI Monitoring Challenges
• VDI Service Monitoring
• Monitoring Capabilities
• eG and Citrix EdgeSight
• VDI Monitor-on-Tap
• Whitepaper
• Press
• Awards
• Presentations
• Demo

Are You Ready for Virtual Desktops?

 

If your IT organization is looking to use virtualization technologies to centralize deployment and management of desktops, you must consider the monitoring and management challenges that you will face as you roll out your virtual desktop infrastructure(VDI).

Your customers will expect their virtual desktops to be as reliable and as fast as their physical desktops. While centralizing desktops on large server farms gives you significant benefits, it also opens up a lot of challenges. A single server failure can bring down tens to hundreds of virtual desktops. Furthermore, since desktops share the same physical server resources, a single resource intensive desktop could reduce the resources available for other desktops.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Monitoring Solutions

To monitor your virtual desktop infrastructure effectively, you must:

• Monitor user activity - Not just VMs: In a virtual desktop infrastructure, the workload of a VM is dependent on which user is logged into the VM and what applications he/she is using. So monitoring virtual machines is not enough, it is important to monitor users and user activity as well.
• Monitor activity inside the desktop: From the virtualization platform, administrators can determine what portion of the physical resources a VM is taking up. While this "outside" view of a VM provides an indicator of the level of activity of a VM, it does not provide additional details regarding why a specific VM is taking up excessive resources. In-depth monitoring to determine which process could be responsible for the increased workload of a VM is critical for effective problem diagnosis and for ensuring peak performance.
• Monitor VDI end-to-end: While the virtualization platform and the virtual desktops are key components of the VDI infrastructure, the performance of the desktop service is also dependent on all the other infrastructure applications and network devices that function together to enable the service. To successfully monitor a VDI implementation, at a minimum you need to monitor all of the components that are involved in the delivery of a desktop with applications to the end user:

Virtual Desktops	Hypervisors (vSphere, XenServer, Hyper-V)	Connection brokers(Citrix XenDesktop, Leostream, VMware View)
Profile servers	Licensing servers	Terminal servers
Network routers	Firewalls	Web front end servers
Active directory	Enterprise applications and databases

The eG VDI Monitor monitors all of these essential components to alert you to impending problems before users notice and complain.

The eG VDI Monitor, part of the eG Enterprise Suite, addresses the above key needs of VDI. You can use the eG VDI Monitor during your initial deployments to identify and eliminate bottlenecks. When a user calls your helpdesk saying that the virtual desktop service is slow or is not working, you can use the eG VDI Monitor to quickly determine the cause of the problem - i.e., is it the network? database? applications? virtual desktop? virtualization platform? storage? etc. Using a patented, automated root-cause diagnosis technology, the eG VDI Monitor analyzes performance across every tier of the infrastructure and correlates them over time. The result is a prioritized set of alerts with the most critical one pointing to the root cause of a problem. By focusing on the most critical alerts, the eG VDI Monitor ensures that you are working on the root cause of your problems.

As you start to scale your virtual desktop infrastructure, the eG VDI Monitor helps you with resource optimization and capacity planning. Using the wealth of metrics that it collects, you can determine where the hot spots in your infrastructure are, how you can balance load across your servers to maximize usage, and where you need to add resources to ensure that the quality of service does not suffer as you roll out additional virtual desktops.

Some of the key benefits you can achieve by using the eG VDI Monitor are:

• Low service downtimes and increased customer satisfaction
• Clear problem demarcation and elimination of finger-pointing
• Optimal usage of current resources
• Easy to use with a short learning curve, so you do not need expert staff to be involved in routine fire fighting

Virtual Desktops or Server Based Computing? eG Enterprise Monitors Both!

Virtual desktops and server-based computing (SBC) technologies (such as Microsoft Terminal Services and Citrix XenApp) have different use cases and are often used in parallel. Often, the same set of administrators are responsible for both environments. eG Enterprise is the only solution in the industry that offers unified monitoring, diagnostics and reporting for VDI and SBC infrastructures. A common look and feel, short learning curve and correlated reports and alerts are some of the benefits you can get when you use eG Enterprise for monitoring all your remote access services.

How Do We Deliver Rapid ROI?

Our eG Single Agent Monitoring Solution doesn't care what virtualization platform you have, what type or size of server (cores, sockets, CPUs), you use, or how many virtual desktops per server you plan to run. For monitoring the virtualization platform, the only question is "How many physical servers do you want to monitor"? That's it.

Because of this simple, single agent architecture, you get...

• One price for monitoring a physical server (regardless of the number of virtual desktops)
• One license to maintain regardless of the virtualization platform (vSphere, XenServer, etc.) or the connection broker (VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop, Leostream, etc.)
• The ability to install and configure without the need for expensive consultants
• The flexibility to change your infrastructure and continue to use the same VDI monitoring solution without need to purchase additional plug-ins

Simple, flexible, portable, agnostic and FAST. Justifying your recommendation to the number crunchers has never been easier.

What's more... your licenses are reusable. If you decide to move your existing server-based applications to virtual desktops, you can reuse licenses you are using for your SBC servers to the new servers that will be hosting virtual desktops.

By now, you should know that you cannot use just any server virtualization monitoring solution for your virtual desktop infrastructure. What you need is a solution that is optimized for monitoring the VDI service end-to-end. You need the eG VDI Monitor.

Click here to know how eG Enterprise complements Citrix EdgeSight >>>