The 7 Secrets to Performance Management of Virtualized Environments – Join the Webinar

We would like to invite you to the upcoming live webinar “The 7 Secrets to Performance Management of Virtualized Environments (Desktop | Applications | Cloud)“ with virtualization expert Dave Bartoletti (Forrester Research) on May 29 @ 2:00 pm ET | 1:00 pm CT | 11 am PT (Register now).

Whether you virtualize desktops or critical business applications, the dynamics and complexities of virtualized environments can cause significant performance and user experience issues that can diminish the benefits of virtualization and risk interruption of critical business processes. The toughest performance problems are the ones where users call and complain that “my application is slow”. IT administrators often struggle to determine the root-cause of the problem and restore service levels: Is it the application server? The virtualization layer? Is it the network? Database? Storage …?

Join our live webinar with virtualization experts Dave Bartoletti (Forrester Research) and Srinivas Ramanathan (eG Innovations), and find out how to deliver:

• Reliable performance assurance and user satisfaction
• Complete performance visibility across your virtualized environment
• Automatic, rapid root cause diagnosis for even the most complex performance problems
• Pre-emptive problem detection and alerting before users call
• Rapid ROI through right-sizing and optimization

WEBINAR DETAILS

Webinar title: “The 7 Secrets to Performance Management of Virtualized Environments (Desktop | Applications | Cloud)”
Date & Time: May 29 @ 2:00 pm ET | 1:00 pm CT | 11 am PT | 7:00 pm UK
Presenters: Dave Bartoletti (Senior Analyst, Forrester Research) | Srinivas Ramanathan (CEO, eG Innovations)
Register now: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/972927160

We look forward to seeing you at the webinar!

New Webinar: Achieving Virtual Desktop Success in Healthcare

We would like to invite you to the upcoming webinar “Achieving Virtual Desktop Success in Healthcare“.  Experts in healthcare IT will discuss the ways you can accelerate virtualized desktop adoption, speed clinician access to Electronic Health Records (EHR), and enhance desktop performance and user experience. Delivering compliant and high performing clinician workspaces depends on creating a consistent desktop experience and remediating bottlenecks that impact performance and user productivity.

This webinar will show you how to deliver “lean” clinician workspaces and assure high levels of user satisfaction:

• Best practices to leverage and pitfalls to avoid when deploying VDI in a hospital
• Architect a virtual workspace that meets your organization’s requirements
• Gain total performance visibility of all IT domains to improve user experience
• Preemptively detect and resolve issues before users are effected
• Optimize current infrastructure usage

WEBINAR DETAILS

Title: “Virtual Desktop Success in Healthcare: Achieve High Performing, Consistent and Compliant Clinician Desktops”

Presenters:
Brian Diamond, CEO, LANStatus
Sean Donahue, Sr. Director Alliances, RES Software
Krish Chandra, Director Solutions Engineering, eG Innovations

Date and Time:
Thursday, May 9, 2013: 11am US PDT | 1PM CDT | 2pm US EDT

Registration Details:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/414101408

We look forward to seeing you at the live webinar!

4 Killer Techniques to Ensure Great UX When Virtualizing Apps, Desktops

If the idea of extending the benefits of virtualization to business critical applications is intimidating and if the thought of poor user experience (UX) and cost overruns is overwhelming, you are not alone. IT environments are changing dramatically and becoming too complex and dynamic for traditional, manual and fragmented management approaches. Whether companies are extending the benefits of virtualization to the next level of business critical applications, virtualizing the desktop layer, adopting multiple virtualization platforms or extending their cloud exposure – no one has tolerance for poor user experience issues and cost overruns.

Some considerations:

1. Take the User Perspective – As more and mission-critical business applications such as SAP are virtualized, more complexity and dynamic dependencies are introduced in the infrastructure required to deliver the service to end users. With this rise in complexity, there are more opportunities for things to go wrong. This makes it even more important that IT administrators focus on understanding the user experience and monitor performance pre-emptively in order to maintain and improve the availability, reliability and performance of mission-critical application environments.
2. Assess Performance as Virtual Desktops Go Mainstream – VDI and virtual desktop adoption continues to accelerate and broaden from pilot to full scale deployments. This increases the likelihood that support teams are bombarded with users calling with “my desktop is slow” issues. Almost half of all VDI projects still fail due to end user experience issues or cost overruns. As projects go full scale, assessing virtual desktop performance in production deployments will become a key concern as companies seek to maintain high end-user satisfaction and high return on their IT investments. Look for performance management platforms that provide deep visibility into the entire VDI service infrastructure, from the desktop and user session to the application and virtualization layer, and across all infrastructure domains that impact user experience.
3. Proactively Manage Cross-domain Dependencies and Complexity – Companies are increasingly taking advantage of multiple virtualization platforms to match the right platform to the specific requirement. VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper V, Citrix XenServer, and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization increase efficiency, enhance flexibility, and reduce hardware cost – but they also add cross-domain dependencies and complexity that needs to be pro-actively managed. This complexity requires a new set of technologies that go beyond traditional silo and vendor centric tools and provide deeper visibility into the virtualization layer, into VMs – from the user session and virtual application to the underlying hardware.
4. Plan the Management of Cloud-based Business Services – Cloud computing in different forms – public, private or hybrid – continues a fast-paced adoption rate as enterprises look to leverage it for improving the agility, scalability, redundancy and costs savings of their business operations. While cloud computing offers enterprises several benefits, it also throws up a number of new challenges when it comes to management of the performance of business services delivered from the cloud. For cloud computing to be successful, it is paramount that users of cloud-based services get the same experience as they would if these services were hosted in their corporate network. Poor user experience can threaten the success and ROI of cloud initiatives. Hence, it is essential that enterprises adopting cloud computing plan how they can manage the performance of cloud-based business services.

When performance issues occur with cloud or on-premise services, it’s often difficult to pinpoint the root cause with traditional tools. A new, holistic approach is needed to ensure uninterrupted visibility across every tier and every layer of the entire cloud ecosystem and to address the needs of different stakeholders – from cloud consumers to service providers of private, public and hybrid clouds.

Traditional performance management tools are not keeping pace with the rapid rate of change in virtualized IT environments – they are too silo driven, lack integration and do not quickly and precisely pinpoint the exact cause of performance challenges. IT managers need intelligent performance management solutions that deliver complete transparency and can troubleshoot the exact source of a problem in minutes rather than hours – ideally before the problem manifests itself to the user.

Article originally featured on WIRED: http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blogs/four-killer-techniques-to-ensure-great-user-experience-when#ixzz2PDWrEqJP

Citrix XenApp 6.5 Performance – How To Ensure A Great End User Experience Before, During and After Your Upgrade

On March 31st, Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 and XenApp 5.0 will reach end of life status. This rapidly approaching deadline makes upgrading to Citrix XenApp 6.5, a high priority for Citrix organizations. This migration also is a catalyst for many companies to virtualize their XenApp environments as well.

This migration can cause a wholesale change in your IT environment because you may have to upgrade to XenApp6.5, 64 bit, Win2008 R2, and virtualization simultaneously. These changes are significant and disruptive but necessary to transform your XenApp environment to take advantages of various advantages the new versions offer. However, this transformation typically introduces a slew of management challenges during and after the migration. How can you transition to the newer platforms without impacting user productivity and business processes?

To manage the transformation effectively, it will be necessary to understand performance and gain visibility throughout all IT tiers including users, applications, OS, virtualization, data, network etc. You will need a solution that can correlate performance, availability, “fault” and capacity data and provide meaningful information that helps you make the right decisions. Having this clarity will help you to identify infrastructure weaknesses s both before and after the upgrade to insure optimum performance and end-user satisfaction.

eG Innovations has the right solution to simplify the complexity of the migration process and deliver a high performing IT environment before, after and during your migration:

• Baseline performance of the existing XenApp Service to understand current application and user behavior and isolate resource intensive candidates.
• Know what is working, and what is not, with total performance visibility and management of every layer and tier of the new upgraded service. This includes support for XenApp servers, support systems such as Provisioning Server, database, web interface, netscaler, virtual or physical infrastructure, storage and network elements.
• Identify potential problems with real-time insights and “deep visibility” into actual user sessions and applications.
• Isolate legacy applications that have compatibility issues with the newer version of XenApp.
• Understand the bottlenecks that impact the migration and that lead to sub-optimal user experience.
• Pre-emptively detect, correlate and remediate performance problems before they start impacting users Gain a clear picture of how the migration has affected your IT environment and how to leverage the infrastructure more efficiently.

For a more in-depth look at how eG Innovations ensures a great user experience before, during and after the XenApp migration, join us for a webinar “Citrix XenApp 6.5 Performance – How To Ensure A Great End User Experience Before, During and After Your Upgrade” on March 28that 11am US PT | 12 US CT | 2pm US ET. Register now: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/841262904

How some of our partners address the XenApp 4.5/5.0 end of life:
RES Software (http://blog.ressoftware.com/index.php/2013/02/12/notes-from-the-road-22-the-end-is-near/)
WhiteHat Virtual Technologies (http://www.whitehatvirtual.com/blog/bid/232849/5-Business-Reasons-to-Upgrade-from-Citrix-4-5-to-6-5)

Virtual Desktop Success ‒ The Role of Performance Assurance in VDI Deployments – Part 3

[Read part 1]  |  [Read part 2]

Here is the final post of our 3-part series about virtual desktop performance:

Best Practices for VDI Success
Based on the earlier discussion, we can conclude that for VDI success, you need to:

• Build performance assurance early into the VDI life cycle. For successful deployments, focus on the virtual desktop infrastructure, not just the virtual desktop. Build performance assurance early in the deployment life cycle in order to avoid costly issues and re-mediation downstream, and to mitigate the risk of VDI failure during deployment. It is imperative that IT considers inter-desktop dependencies from the very beginning. When deploying VDI on a large scale, avoid slow, manual ad-hoc processes not only for the deployment but also for performance assurance. Automation is a key to being able to be alerted to problems in advance, well before users notice and complain.
• 360-degree visibility is key. Today, service delivery is more demanding than ever. Companies require 360-degree VDI service visibility of every layer, every tier of the infrastructure ‒ from desktops to applications and from network to storage. The virtual desktop where user applications run is often a blindspot and VDI service managers require the ability to look inside the virtual desktop to understand user activity and the performance they are seeing. It is critical to be able to get this level of visibility without needing to install agents on each and every desktop.

Often, different tools are used for monitoring each of the VDI tiers. This leaves a lot of room for finger-pointing between domain administrators. Having the ability to monitor all the different tiers from a single unified console and being able to analyze the performance of these tiers from a single console, across a common time window, is a key to effective management of the virtual desktop infrastructure.

• Manage VDI as a service, not as many silos. Administrators need deep insights into the causes of VDI service performance issues in order to detect and fix root-cause problems. It’s no longer useful to monitor individual silos because of the complexity of today’s infrastructures. There are just too many opportunities for problems. Also, bear in mind that VDI service managers are not likely to be experts in each of the technologies used in the infrastructure. Therefore, it’s essential that they have access to management solutions that can intelligently analyze and correlate between problems at different tiers and help them quickly pinpoint where the root-cause of problems lie. Since the virtualization platform is an integral part of the infrastructure, the management solution must be virtualization-aware, i.e., it must be capable of monitoring the virtualization platform, but it must also be intelligent enough to understand the inter-dependencies between the virtualization platform and the applications and desktops that it hosts.

Conclusion
By proactively alerting administrators to problems and providing accurate root-cause diagnosis, a performance assurance solution ensures that the performance of a virtual desktop is comparable to that of a physical desktop. By providing deep insights into the performance of each VDI tier and identifying areas for optimization, a performance assurance solution can ensure that the infrastructure is right-sized and thereby generates the best return on investment. For these reasons, enterprises deploying virtual desktop infrastructures must consider performance assurance early on in the VDI life cycle. Historical analysis has indicated that these deployments have had the best chance of virtual desktop deployment success.

Virtual Desktop Success ‒ The Role of Performance Assurance in VDI Deployments – Part 2

[Read part 1]

Let’s continue our 3-part series about virtual desktop performance:

Multi-tier architecture makes VDI challenging
From a user’s perspective, VDI is a very simple service – the user logs in with their domain account and can access applications on their desktop. From an administration perspective, VDI is a lot tougher to manage than it appears to be for a user. The reason for this is there are many, many tiers of software and hardware that have to work together to support the service. A user logging in connects to a connection broker first. The broker authenticates the user using Active Directory. Once the user is authenticated, the broker communicates with a virtualization platform (vSphere, XenServer, Hyper-V, etc.) and provisions a virtual desktop. The desktop OS may be streamed from a provisioning server, and the storage for the desktop is hosted on a SAN. For VDI to work, every tier of this infrastructure should work. If not, users will experience slowness and complain about performance.

The Role of Performance Assurance
In most VDI projects, performance assurance is not looked at upfront. The focus initially is on the VDI technology – Which broker to use? What protocols to use? What thin clients to use? Once the VDI deployment is underway and users start complaining about slowness, that is when performance monitoring, reporting and root-cause diagnosis get attention. The questions then are: Where is the bottleneck? Is it due to capacity? Or due to one user or application hogging resources? Or could it be that the workload has changed?

Many times there are no benchmarks of normal usage across the infrastructure. Hence, it’s impossible to tell whether the workload has changed or is different from what was expected when the infrastructure was first planned. Making problem diagnosis harder is the fact that different tiers of the infrastructure are managed by different teams and each of these teams may be using a different toolset to monitor the infrastructure. Coordinating across the domain experts to determine the exact cause of slowness can be a time-consuming and expensive exercise. After the problem is finally isolated, it may be too difficult to fix an issue (because the VDI architecture is already in place) or the remedial action may entail significant changes to the existing architecture, making the problem resolution process lengthy and expensive.

Effective performance management doesn’t just help with the diagnosis of problems. It can also help you optimize your infrastructure, so you can get more out of your infrastructure investments. For instance, you may find out that a few of your servers are handling most of your users, while other servers are idling. By detecting such imbalances in load distribution, you may be able to identify changes that can make your infrastructure function more effectively.
Understanding the performance requirements of your users can also help you plan the virtual desktop infrastructure more efficiently. For example, if you know which users run applications that are CPU intensive and which ones run applications that are memory intensive, you can distribute your workload in such a way that a server has a good mix of CPU intensive and memory intensive users, so that the server’s resources are best utilized. On the other hand, your user density (number of users per server) would be a lot less if you had all your CPU intensive users on the same server.

[Read part 3]

Virtual Desktop Success ‒ The Role of Performance Assurance in VDI Deployments – Part 1

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has been a hot topic for years – and every year one expert or another makes a claim that this will be the year of VDI. Finally, 2013 may be the year that VDI goes mainstream. We’re seeing the cost of VDI implementation come down to being roughly comparable to the cost of managing PC endpoints. Many organizations are starting to move from pilot to production. While the pilots worked fine, many organizations are finding that VDI projects fail in the rollout phase due to performance and poor user experience issues. One of the key reasons for this is that the pilot phase is often over-provisioned and less complex.

Don’t miss the infrastructure demands by focusing too much on the desktop
Very often, when an enterprise begins 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 VDI is made, the primary focus is often to benchmark the performance of physical desktops, model usage, predict the virtualized user experience and, based on the results, determine which desktops can be virtualized and which can’t.

With VDI, the virtual desktops no longer have dedicated resources. The virtual desktops share the CPU, memory, disk and network resources of the physical machine on which they are hosted. While resource sharing provides several benefits, it also introduces new complications in the infrastructure. A single malfunctioning desktop can drain resources to the point that it impacts the performance of all the other desktops.

Resource sharing across virtual desktops also introduces other interesting artifacts. In many of the early VDI deployments, administrators found that when they just migrated physical desktops to VDI, backups or antivirus software could cause problems. 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 all the virtual desktops. This was not something that was anticipated because the focus of most designs and plans was on individual desktops and not the holistic virtual desktop infrastructure.

The cost of failure with VDI is much higher than with physical desktops
In the physical world if a desktop failed, only one user would be impacted – so the failure or slowdown was minimal. In the virtual world, a single malfunctioning desktop is much more severe, as one failure can impact hundreds of desktops. A CTO of a large multi-national organization recently mentioned this as the single biggest reason why he was averse to moving to virtual desktop technology.

[Read part 2]

The Right Tools for Virtual Desktop Performance

Frank Ohlhorst posted a great article on SearchVirtualDesktop “Straightening out virtual desktop snags with VDI monitoring tools”, outlining common issues faced by VDI deployments and what to look for in VDI performance monitoring and management tools.

“With a comprehensive understanding of the situation, it becomes easy to resolve even the most complex VDI problem. The key to success lies with an integrated view of network traffic, coupled with hardware and applications.”

Read the entire post here.

Visit eG Innovations @ VMworld Barcelona (and next week @ Synergy Barcelona)

Visit eG Innovations at VMworld Barcelona (booth # E503) and take a look at the new performance management platform eG Enterprise 5.6. See live how to pro-actively detect and automatically diagnose performance issues in complex, virtualized environments so you can deliver exceptional performance, user satisfaction, and ROI. And make sure to enter the raffle to win a Google Nexus 7 tablet. And don’t forget to see us next week at Citrix Synergy in Barcelona (also booth #503)!

New Webinar – Desktop Virtualisation Choices: Citrix XenDesktop, XenApp or VDI in a Box – How to Decide

A growing number of companies are virtualising desktop environments to reduce cost and boost flexibility. The dizzying array of available solutions can make the first step quite difficult – what virtualisation technology is right for my organization? Citrix alone offers XenDesktop, XenApp and VDI in a box. The right choice really depends on what your business needs are. While Citrix desktop virtualisation often seems like a simple project, user experience problems, delayed deployments, and cost overruns can quickly turn this project into a nightmare.

Join the webinar “Desktop Virtualisation Choices: Citrix XenDesktop, XenApp or VDI in a Box – How to Decide“ and learn from Citrix desktop virtualization expert Andrew Wood (Gilwood CS Ltd) and eG Innovations’ Keith Girt how to decide what virtualisation technology best fits your needs.

Hear how to determine what technology is right for you based on:

• Your goals for desktop virtualisation
• Number of users, applications, and profiles
• Existing infrastructure issues
• Cost of ownership vs. cost savings
• Performance and scalability considerations

WEBINAR DETAILS

Date & Time: September 20 @ 2 pm UK (London) | 3 pm CET (Paris, Berlin) | 9:00 am ET (New York) | 9:00 pm (Hong Kong)

Presenters: Andrew Wood (Gilwood CS Ltd), Keith Girt (eG Innovations)

Registration: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/308127465

We look forward to seeing you at the webinar!