Proper distribution of your resources can make your VDI experience much more efficient and cost-effective. In order to properly design and optimize your VDI environment, you must first identify your users. There are four typical end user types we see in customer environments:
- Task Workers perform defined and routine tasks. They may be clerical workers, administrative people, or call center workers.
- Knowledge Workers perform a variety of daily tasks that may be both simple and complex. They are typically professionals or executives.
- Power Users use specialized applications that may be graphically demanding. They may be artists (3D or 2D) or designers.
- Mobile Users may be disconnected from the network for a long period of time and may check out desktops or access their desktop from a variety of end user devices.
As a professional services implementer, we see many of our users configure a single user pool in their VDI environment to support their highest-demand power user. While this method does ensure that every user has adequate resources, many users end up having excessive memory or CPU resources assigned to them. For example, we may see a pool of 100 users with 4GB of memory assigned to each, but in reality only 10 of those power users need 4GB of memory. The other 90 knowledge workers may only need 2GB of memory. By developing multiple user pools for each user type – instead of configuring all your users based on the power user profile – you can eliminate wasted resources. In this scenario, if you were to develop two pools (10 users with 4GB, 90 users with 2GB), 180GB of memory could be reclaimed from the environment to increase end user count.
So how do you determine if your users are over allocated? The simplest way is to use a monitoring tool, like Liquidware Labs Stratusphere UX or VMware vCOPS for View to monitor actual use and properly design your pool resources.
If you haven’t started your desktop virtualization journey yet, a Desktop Readiness Assessment will help you evaluate your current state environment and help you determine how to set up the user pools.
