The Future of VDI: Increasing Competitiveness Through Speed and Agility

Virtualisation, in one form or another, has been on the rise in the enterprise steadily over the last decade. With organisations looking to manage a variety of different applications from different locations, and at a variety of service levels, CIOs are starting to think differently about the real power that virtualisation can bring to an organisation.

One area where there are significant levels of change is in VDI, virtual desktop infrastructure. In virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), multiple desktops are hosted in virtual machines on centralised servers in the data centre. Sometimes called client virtualisation, VDI can improve data mobility, provide greater control and increase efficiency.

To take advantage of VDI, IT executives need to understand the environments in which they are working and then look to act accordingly. Here are three steps which organisations can attempt to build a blueprint from.

1. Identify Key Requirements

VDI is a powerful tool that generates a large amount of business enablement as well as ensuring a high level of security. However, if you are looking to virtualise specific environments within your business and go down the hyper-convergence route, it is critical to understand your activities key workloads and overall needs.

Even now, over 65% of workloads are sitting on-premise. The hype of cloud and hyper-convergence might be at fever-pitch from a marketing perspective, but for the practitioners, it is a different story.

It is for this reason that you need to assess your business requirements before undertaking a transformation effort and make sure that the solution is right for the application.

2. Evaluate What Your Systems Performance

It is essential once you understand the lay of the land that you then evaluate the levels of performance that your operation requires. When assessing VDI, you must ensure that your applications are validated by VDI industry-standard testing. These standards are becoming more common and creating an industry within itself.

Performance in any business is vital and ultimately ensuring a higher level of performance than what was run before is what will validate your transformation efforts.

3. Size Correctly, and Prepare for Scale

Getting the size right is also a critical element to VDI. If you are too narrow performance is lost, too broad and the investment could be wasted. It is important to consider the number of users supported and the use cases involved.

It is critical to consider the potential growth of this environment and what it might mean to your overall investment. If you prepare a blueprint which cannot scale, you are just preparing a blueprint for another blueprint.

This editorial was created in conjunction with HPE and Fujitsu.