As an industry we have learned a few lessons when it comes to designing and optimizing virtual desktop environments. Things like the importance of carefully designing the storage infrastructure, and carefully considering the “use cases” both in terms of users and the applications they use can make or break a desktop virtualization project. Experienced IT pros will tell you that among IT projects, none so dramatically has the potential to impact end users than a desktop operating system (OS) deployment. Doing a poor job in an OS update or migration can leave users feeling frustrated, damage IT’s credibility and can ultimately create resistance to future projects.
It is no different when it comes to creating desktop images for virtual environments (virtual image). Migrating and optimizing images for virtual environments is not simply a matter of installing the Windows operating system or converting as existing physical desktop image to a virtual image. One of the items sometimes overlooked in desktop virtualization deployments is not taking the time and care to optimize the base desktop operating system for virtualization, and assessing the implications of the critical applications that will be used in the virtual environment.
Given the preeminence of the Microsoft Office productivity suite as a core tool set in organizations today, applications such as Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint can almost be considered to be primary “tools of the trade” for many employees. Office applications are used by the entire spectrum of users from task workers through knowledge workers to power users. It is no surprise that desktop “golden images” will often include one or more Office suite applications. So what happens if there is a desire/need to upgrade these “tools of the trade” applications? What if any implications are there, and what might be the impact(s) of a seemingly simple application upgrade be in a virtual environment.
Our Dell desktop virtualization solution engineering team recently undertook testing to assess the implications related to user density of an upgrade from Office 2010 to Office 2013 in virtualized environments. Office 2013 leverages DirectX v10 multimedia capabilities, while Office 2007 and Office 2010 use older versions of DirectX. In this testing we were interested to understand the potential implications of moving to Office 2013 given the richer graphics capability of DirectX v10.
The results are interesting and there are definite user density and scaling implications of moving from Office 2010 to Office 2013. I won’t spoil the ending here!! J We published the test results and discussed the implications in this Dell TechCenter article–it’s an interesting read–check it out! We concluded that careful consideration should be given to the implications of enterprise application migrations in virtualized environments.
This testing article is one small example of the testing, qualification and verification work we here at Dell are doing to optimize our solutions for desktop virtualization with VMware. Our goal is to help streamline your deployments with practical knowledge and best practices. Please enjoy.
Additional resources:
Dell DVS Enterprise with VMware Horizon View 5.2 Reference Architecture
Dell Desktop Virtualization Solutions web page