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Ever since the pandemic hit and made remote working the new normal, the adoption rate of desktop virtualization has skyrocketed, owing to the plenty of benefits the technology offers to organizations.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is one type of desktop virtualization that enables businesses to host a multitude of desktops on a single, central server that authenticated users can access from an endpoint device, regardless of their location. This can save organizations from making major hardware investments and save as much as 30% in IT administrative costs.
However, organizations relying on VDI sometimes struggle with long system boot time, slow application response times, and a plethora of other performance issues that downgrade user experience. VDI solution providers play a key role in enhancing the VDI experience by providing tailored customizations as relevant to the organizations’ IT environment and VDI performance needs. The right solution vendor can make all the difference in improving the stability of the platform through the right customizations and continued optimizations of key components of the VDI deployment.
Let’s now look at what causes performance issues in VDI and what can be done for better performance and efficiency.
Factors that might be killing the performance of your VDI
Security practices
As organizations turn to VDI, they also need to pay attention to the security aspects. The approach towards malware protection and antivirus technologies needs to be tweaked for virtualization. If these software and programs are run the same way on virtual services as on physical services, it would impact the performance of the VDI technology and put pressure on its capabilities.
Storage
VDI environments use shared storage across desktops. The problem with this is that it distributes the total number of inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) available, which often slows down a desktop.
Lack of endpoint monitoring tools
VDIs are usually complex to assess and challenging to troubleshoot should there arise a problem or performance issue within them. As a result, many users accept that they can’t do anything about poor user experience while using VDI. This creates a negative impact on the adoption of the technology, preventing businesses from using VDI on a large scale to streamline their business.
With endpoint monitoring tools, businesses can monitor the end-user experience and locate issues immediately and take necessary actions to improve the performance of their VDI technology. However, a lack of robust monitoring tools can keep them from finding performance issues in the first place.
Network
VDI performance can be significantly affected by a lack of dedicated network segmentation for the VDI workload. If the system struggles to get the necessary network resources, performance will be impacted.
Things you can do to improve the performance of your VDI
GPU acceleration
VDI typically supports a larger number of users — and with diverse needs — which increases the workload and limits performance. With the integration of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) into their existing VDI technology, organizations can meet the demands of the increasing workload and user needs. This will also improve graphic performance and end-user experience. They can select a GPU solution that matches their unique workload requirements and deploy Nvidia or Intel GPUs depending on the performance requirements and licensing models.
Solid State Drives
Using a solid-state drive can allow you to dedicate much-needed storage to your VDI, which can help it perform its operations independently — without relying on the storage of physical desktops.
With dedicated SSDs, your VDI will never have to compete with connection brokers to get its share of IOPS and can work smoothly.
Automated image optimization applications
Some automated image optimization applications enable administrators to automatically apply required operating system improvements and changes to their VDI workloads without manual intervention. This helps optimize VDI performance, reduce management tasks and improve end-user experience.
Virtualization-aware AV software
Since security has a role to play in VDI performance, installing virtualization-aware AV software can protect the VDI environment from potential threats and improve overall performance. A solution partner that understands your virtualization needs will help build a design-specific solution. It won’t require expert technicians to deploy virtual servers, virtual desktops, and other related systems. What working with the right virtualization partner will do is help you remove complexities & simplify VDI operations and optimize key components to maintain stability.
Network segmentation
The same way dedicated solid-state drives help VDI meet its workload requirements, a dedicated network segment for your VDI can significantly boost its performance. VDI relies on a network for migrating between hosts, providing a connection to monitoring, management, and administrative tools, and many other tasks, all of which take up network resources. And if you can put your VDI on a separate network segment, it will not have to compete for network resources and can hence work optimally.
VDI technology can sometimes present a number of performance issues, especially if you have numerous users. But with a few steps taken towards eradicating those issues, and most importantly, with the right VDI solution provider, you can get the most out of this next-gen technology to streamline your work operations and enable secure remote working for your employees.
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