By Jeff Erlichman

Take the time and effort to conduct ongoing virtual reality checks during your “six degrees to desktop separation”.

Success starts and ends with your user’s experience; they are your ongoing virtual reality checks.

If workers in your organization have their own stand-alone, “fat client” PCs, then they enjoy for the most part fast CPU response, multi-media access and broad peripheral support.

Unless your Virtual Desktop does the same, most users will not see it is a positive experience. So your goal is not to replicate, but to actually improve the user experience with:

*Better overall performance: if your virtual server-based desktops run on faster, more reliable hardware, you can deliver faster application performance and a more responsive desktop.

*Faster Instant-on: virtual desktops can start much faster than disk-based operating systems.

*Easy mobility: virtual desktops deliver current desktops and data securely to any endpoint, so employees can travel light or work from home.

*Effective support: technology-enhanced support tracks performance, and accelerates diagnosis and resolution of user issues.

*Toleration to WAN latency: to deliver agility and security half a world away-where you need them most. This is because user interfaces-display, mouse/keyboard, audio/video-are extraordinarily sensitive to latency. What works in the lab may be useless in an overseas office. No matter what solution you buy, this must be tested.

*Solutions that solve management problems: for example you consolidate management with standardized provisioning procedures and automated rollouts for peak performance during critical events.

*The ability to stay flexible: open solutions have proven their value in servers, and now virtualization platforms, so keep your options open.

*Desktop Provisioning to deliver the OS image on demand.

*User personalization on the OS image delivered dynamically.

*Applications delivered when needed and in the most appropriate way, independently of the core operating system.

*The complete desktop presented to the end user on any device, over any network.

This is what your Virtual Desktop solution should deliver, according to Simmons. Demand that your supplier provide these features.

The Big Payoff
So, you replicated and even improved your user’s desktop experience and you are getting the benefits of the points mentioned above.

Demand that your Virtual Desktop provider delivers real value added.

Here is more good news. When it comes to server utilization, it can be as low as 20% said Simmons. Virtualization dramatically increases that number. But along with server utilization, in government you’ve also got a square footage utilization issue. A lot of the server sprawl and the storage sprawl that has happened over the years put pressure on the ability just to house capacity in a data center that was built 2, 3, 4, 5 years ago according to Simmons.

“Virtualization absolutely gives you a solution to the physical plant problem,” said Simmons.

Finally, the big payoff comes when organizations look at the bottom line. “We have a big virtualization project with Bechtel virtualizing their entire infrastructure,” reported Simmons. “In their first year anniversary of fully going virtual in their environment, they looked back and saw a 40% reduction in their overall IT costs.”

And those aren’t virtual dollars, they are real.