Are You Ready to Virtualize?

We're going to talk about whether we're ready to virtualize, and what I'm going to show you today is probably one of my favorite ways to tackle this problem. Virtualization projects are very difficult to begin with because a lot of times you just don't know what's out there already. You may have an idea, but you don't really know how systems are being utilized, what software is being used, or whether applications are behaving correctly in the environment. Those are all things that you really need to cover because virtualizing workloads is going to bring existing problems over, or you're going to do a lot of work building images and putting software in them that nobody uses.

The very first thing that I want to talk about today is the SysTrack Persona Visualizer. The reason this is so great is because it's starting to break people down into resource groups. You have roles such as knowledge workers, task workers, and power workers. Power workers are doing a lot, so you can identify some of those users. You can see in the environment how many users fall into a group, how many applications we've seen them run and are monitoring, and we're also identifying what their critical applications are. This persona, for example, has six critical applications. The way we determine that is by understanding focus hours. When those users are active on the system, we measure their focus time. Now we have those applications, and we don't just have the application names. We also have average usage and resource demand, including memory, disk, network, CPU, and other metrics. This gives us a better idea of what we're going to end up dealing with once those workloads are virtualized.

Now let me step back and talk a little bit more about those applications. I've already pulled up Teams and another Visualizer for Application Faults. This is where we're tracking applications that are hanging, applications that are crashing, blue screens, and similar issues. The reason this is really important is because these issues can be detrimental to a virtual desktop pool. If software is currently behaving poorly in your physical desktop and laptop environment, moving that same version of the software into a virtual environment is not going to fix anything simply because the system is virtualized. We need to pay attention to what our applications are doing in the environment, and there may be some additional investigation that you need to do.

You should probably watch one of our Resolve videos that covers a deeper dive, because you may discover that a particular version of Teams, when it hangs, pegs the CPU or does something else that's detrimental to the user experience and results in support tickets.

With virtual desktops, in my experience, you want to tackle many of these issues upfront because users are often hesitant about change. If they're moving from a physical desktop to a virtual desktop, even if a problem existed previously, once it happens in the virtual desktop environment they tend to become much more sensitive to it. There are likely going to be some issues that reach the Service Desk, but that's why you're using the SysTrack data to gain a solid understanding of the environment.

Are you ready to virtualize these workloads?