Virtual Desktops: Start Slow & Grow

When it comes to big projects, there are two types of people in the world: Those who jump all in at once and those who ease their way in. (Think people wade into a pool so their body has time to adjust to the temperature of the water versus those who cannonball right in.) While each approach has its merits and place, when it comes to implementing virtual desktops, slow and steady is often the better choice.

Not only does VDI take a lot of strategic planning, the end result will look very different for different users within your organization. Take a second to think about all the different software and computing requirements different departments use. Your development team doesn’t have the same needs as your customer support team, who has different needs than marketing and finance and so on.

Taking the time to isolate use cases and identify a certain area to start with is the path to success with VDI. Dizzion CTO and co-founder Robert Green recently shared that advice with Channel Buzz:

“We believe the key to success is to avoid trying to start all-in with a customer, because there are too many use cases in different departments. You need to personalize. We follow a ‘land and expand’ strategy, where we will look to design a customized solution around, say, 25 desktops and one event.”

A Custom VDI Solution

Identifying smaller use cases is helpful in several ways when approaching VDI:

• Allows you to truly understand user need
• Allows you to right size computing resources
• Focuses your planning and build process
• A virtual desktop Golden Image can be created to provision and manage that use case

While you don’t want to get hyper granular (which can result in having too many Golden Images to reasonably manage), starting by defining the needs and uses case for each department or like-segment of end users can help you identify patterns that can then be grouped together.

Approaching desktop virtualization this way (instead of treating everyone the same) will ensure that each user group has a virtual desktop configuration that works for them. Getting the virtual desktop experience as close as possible to the traditional desktop experience users are accustomed to is key to encouraging quick adoption and minimizing support tickets and user dissatisfaction.

The Importance of Early Adopters

No project ever goes off without a hitch, no matter how well planned. If you attempt to roll virtual desktops out to your entire organization at once you run the risk of encountering a few major drawbacks:

• Issues that affect your entire organization – potentially with major productivity impacts
• Multiple issues from different departments (that you then have to prioritize)
• Leaving the entire organization with a sour taste in their mouth about desktop virtualization, making a future successful rollout more difficult

Starting with a specific use case will allow you to identify and rectify speed bumps with minimal organizational or project impact. You can also gather direct feedback from the early adopters to see how the virtual desktops are performing in the wild and to ensure you accurately anticipated their needs and desires. By positioning this as an early roll out that they’ll play an important role in you may be able to get more honest feedback as well as more understanding while you fine tune the solution.

Expanding on Success

Once you’ve worked out any initial kinks and addressed unanticipated needs or hurdles, you can begin expanding virtual desktops to additional use cases. Bear in mind, the initial roll out will have helped smooth the way, but each use case is unique and you’ll likely still encounter aspects that need fine tuning. For this reason, you should consider expanding based on use case rather than rushing to support an entire organization.

By approaching the roll out in chunks, you have more time and focus to ensure the solution is working properly for each end user. Desktops aren’t a “one size fits all” solution and teams that take the time and energy to personalize the experience based on user need will find their way to a much more successful virtual desktop transition.

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