Peer to Peer Magazine

LESSONS LEARNED • Rapid Delivery: Spin up a virtual desktop from within the data center in minutes rather than taking the hours or days typically required to provision and configure a physical computer. • A Better Remote Access Experience: Attorneys connect to the same personalized virtual desktop whether in or away from the office. • Controlled Security: The virtual desktop is hosted from within the secure confines of your data center. • BYOT-Enabled: Delivering the desktop-as-a-service makes it easier to deliver secure anytime, anywhere, from-any-device access to firm resources for organizations embracing a "bring your own technology" strategy. KEY LESSONS LEARNED • PCoIP is an evolving protocol. It took us a lot of trial and error to identify the optimal configuration for our environment given VMware's limited experience with a WAN-based configuration similar to ours. • QoS and CoS is a must from a performance perspective. We experienced the "build to lossless" video issues I described earlier until we tagged our VDI traffic with the highest priority class-of-service level available. • WAN stability and redundancy are critical in a centralized data center environment. Without this, a single service outage can impact all your virtual desktop users. • An N+1 VDI cluster configuration is a must for cluster high availability. As long as you maintain 70 percent or less resource utilization across all cluster nodes, you can lose a node and not take a performance hit during a node failure. It's not a matter of "if" a node will go down but rather "when" one will go down. Been there, done that. • Go with a solid storage platform designed for heavy disk IO. Use of disk-caching memory cards is highly recommended for increasing disk IOPS capacity. • Don't overlook the storage cost component of your deployment. SAN and NAS storage is obviously a lot more expensive than PC or laptop disk. 98 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer • Consider deploying a print cluster in the same location where your primary VDI resources reside for optimal print processing. This made a big difference for us. • Consider moving to Exchange 2010 if you're not already there. We're making that move soon but are still running Exchange 2003 today. We moved to cache mode for Outlook over five years ago to mask backend Exchange 2003 inefficiencies. We were not planning to run Outlook cache mode in our virtual desktop environment, but those old Outlook performance issues have now resurfaced, and we'll likely have to run Outlook in cache mode for some of our larger mailbox users until our Exchange 2010 migration is completed early next year. • Prepare your technical support staff well with formal training, white paper research and peer networking. NO LOOKING BACK Making the argument for VDI can still be a tough sell for many, purely from a dollars and cents perspective. This is especially true now with IT budgets still tight, but the benefits are undeniable. This move to delivering the desktop-as-a-service is truly changing the way we work. A desktop isn't a physical machine that sits on a desk anymore. For Foley, it's now a service that one can connect to securely anytime, anywhere and from any device. It's a game changer. We're pressing ahead with VDI and VMware View and not looking back. ILTA Rick Varju is the Director of Engineering and Operations at Foley & Lardner LLP, where he is responsible for the firm's two national data centers, all messaging, WAN/LAN/wireless, telephony, security, database administration, servers, storage, data protection, virtualization and the remote access infrastructure. Rick is a member of Foley's Technology Leadership Team and the Data Privacy, Security & Compliance Committee. He can be reached at rvaju@foley.com.

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