Cloud Computing: Top 5 causes of virtual desktop and application downtime
June 25, 2013
Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Ed Tittel and Earl Follis.
Once you’ve bet your IT strategy on virtual desktops, availability and performance of those desktops become a priority. If users cannot access their virtual desktop or performance is too slow to get their work done, the villagers will no doubt come after you with torches, demanding their local desktops back. To help you avoid getting burned, let’s look at the top five factors that affect virtual desktop and application downtime, plus how to avoid — or at least mitigate — these risks.
1. Lack of end-user monitoring
Have you ever received a flurry of help desk complaints about poor performance for specific applications? Your infrastructure team checks the network, servers, databases and applications, only to indicate that all infrastructure components are up and running as expected. This situation illustrates the difference between IT services being up and IT services being available from an end-user’s perspective. If users perceive a performance issue, then you have a performance issue, whether your monitoring tools reflect that perception or not. You can avoid this problem by having an end-user performance monitoring tool in your overall monitoring toolkit. These tools can give you performance statistics and alerts based on availability and response time for your virtual desktops, from an end-user perspective…
2. Hardware failures
A redundant virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is key to avoiding hardware failures that can affect virtual desktop availability. Once again, comprehensive monitoring is a great place to start. Many hardware manufacturers now include utilities that use predictive analysis of hardware operating parameters to warn you of an imminent failure. Still, hardware sometimes breaks with no warning or indication of an impending failure. Hardware redundancy is the logical solution, so redundancy should be designed into your virtual desktop architecture from the get-go…