In regard to desktop virtualization, what aspects of implementation do higher ed institutions tend to overlook?
“It’s easy to overlook security when implementing new technologies, and a good example of this is desktop virtualization. It’s an efficient way to deploy the same functionality across multiple machines, however, you’ll most likely need to adjust security practices to fit the new virtual environment.”
—Slawek Ligier, vice president of Security Engineering, Barracuda
“With hyperconvergence, all-flash storage and hybrid IT, desktop virtualization performance bottlenecks have moved from data center to end-user. Most institutions overlook monitoring using proper tools. This helps pinpoint performance bottlenecks as well as handle capacity and change management.”
—Kong Yang, virtualization management head geek, SolarWinds
“The aspect oftentimes overlooked is leveraging assessment and benchmarking tools to analyze and compare the existing environment against the VDI environment. Doing so facilitates the definition of the service catalogs with the associated service-level agreements, which ultimately empowers the project team to clearly quantify that the performance and the end-user experience is better than the existing environment that’s being replaced.”
—Louis Cheng, Senior Manager, Public Relations, VMware
“Once virtualized, desktops become part of the university IT server and storage infrastructure. Backup and virus protection tools that run as agents on each desktop need to be changed out for solutions that work outside the desktop. Ensuring 24-7 availability is the key. A single server or storage system going down could cripple the ability of students, faculty and administrators to do their jobs.”
—Doug Hazelman, vice president of product strategy at Veeam
