Your 7-step guide for a highly effective VDI environment

The emergence of today’s hottest trends such as cloud, consumerization and mobile IT has increased the importance and necessity of virtualization. According to the leading industry analysts, “The Virtualization Solutions market is expected to grow 12.3 percent year-over-year in 2013 and maintain this pace as it moves from 14 percent overall market share in 2011 to more than 20 percent in 2016”. With its increasing adoption at scale across industries and becoming the next logical step for today’s corporate IT Infrastructure, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI has now become mainstream.

It is known that many VDI projects fail or under-perform typically due to user experience issues, performance issues and escalating costs as businesses move from PoC and pilot stages to production. While the new generation VDI technologies have matured over the past few years and address many of these challenges, lack of right initial planning and understanding what doesn’t work well or hasn’t worked for other businesses (use cases) may become a bottleneck. Some of the key mistakes done by enterprises undertaking VDI transformation journey are:

No consideration to User Profiling: It is not only important to determine the end-user environment – local vs. remote, knowledge users vs. task users, percentage of non-employee users (contractors, partners etc.) but also important to understand the end-user experience requirements, such as user profile persistence, single vs. multiple desktop needs, printing requirements, audio profile, monitor support etc. to avoid user experience issues and performance inefficiency.
No consideration to Application Virtualization: Application Virtualization strategy is critical to successful VDI implementation. Enterprises typically have to face issues such as installing every application into a standard desktop image, creating multiple images based on different user groups etc., therefore an assessment to analyze important details like total number of application users, average load time etc. needs to be captured. Application Virtualization also enables you to manage any endpoint as a generic device, making complex OS upgrades much easier.
Improper Design: VDI consists of three key components – Server, Storage and Network. VDI design should be done keeping in mind the maximum scalable limit and minimal downtime of these three components.
Improper Resource Allocation/Sizing: As the resources are shared between multiple users, it must be considered that there is no over-commitment of number of users on a single resource. Effective sizing of the servers, network, and storage must be done to give a good virtual desktop computing experience to the end-users.
VDI is a complex and a long-term project. In addition to the above mentioned considerations, VDI adoption must be coordinated across business units, divisions, personnel, workloads, security etc. for an enterprise wide success.

Enterprises undertaking the journey must be absolutely certain that VDI is the right solution for them and it will address their current infrastructure complexities. The use cases, benefits, TCO, and infrastructure requirements must be evaluated to make sure VDI is for the right reasons.

Successful VDI Implementation is directly connected to working with the right approach and following the best practices. Assessing customer’s core applications, operating environment, user profiles and user experience is the key of planning for any VDI rollout.

Below is a recommended seven-phased approach for a successful VDI Implementation:

Step 1: Assess
A top down approach should be adopted during VDI Assessment phase that primarily focuses on customer requirements and aligns those requirements with the set of users and assess those users to capture the resource metrics. Defined metrics should be used to capture information on utilization of CPU, memory, network, storage and other compute resources. These metrics are important for proper design and sizing of infrastructure resources and virtual desktop images needed for each group of users. A proper assessment will prevent design errors that cost both time and money. It will also help speed up the pilot and production phases.

Step 2: Plan
The planning phase is critical as it requires developing high level design documents including specifications of VDI components such as hardware, hypervisor, connection broker, gateway etc. While detailed planning for pilot and migration is important, operational readiness for implementation should also be planned.

Step 3: Design
The Design phase is divided into steps that deal with the most impactful design decisions first. Understanding how customer use cases are mapped to VDI and its desktop pools and desktop resource requirements, helps determine the underlying hypervisor design and subsequent components that sit on top. The Design phase should also consider user’s functional requirements at each step. For example, if the user requires a USB device to be plugged into the client device, the device and operating system must support USB redirection or if the user requires a multimedia application the client device must support a protocol that can provide adequate user experience. Capturing this information helps the architect to understand the interdependent relationships at each layer. Design validation is also highly important to ensure high degree assurance.

Step 4: Pilot
VDI Pilot phase is intended to help conduct an end-user pilot of a VDI prototype that is engineered from the start to alleviate any concerns end-users may have about transitioning to a virtual desktop for full-time use, and to justify a widespread production deployment to senior management. This is accomplished by helping the organization teams clearly define the goals and objectives of the pilot, which entails understanding the requirements and needs of end users.

Step 5: Implement
Successful Implementation is directly linked to the Design. The Implementation phase falls into two places one is in Pilot and another is in Production Environment. Though the implementation phase takes considerably less time compared to design it is one of the core activities of the VDI projects.

Step 6: User Migration
User profile migration is one of the most critical and sensitive activities in VDI projects. Migrations Plans must be strategized for seamless user data migrations and profile migrations from existing physical desktops to virtual desktops using third-party tools or manual methods.

Step 7: Manage & Support
After successful implementation and user migration, monitoring and management of the VDI environment is important to maximize user satisfaction and enhance their productivity. Operational performance must also be monitored and maintained to ensure higher service uptime and control costs. This is an on-going phase and involves time-to-time user profile management, desktop pool management, access control & identity management etc. Enterprises must identify appropriate skills, efficient processes and automated tools for an efficient management of their VDI environment.

Most VDI projects perform well till the Pilot phase and start to throw up unexpected performance issues while being rolled out in the production environments with thousands of users. VDI performance assessment must be done at each phase of the project to identify bottlenecks, restore performance and deliver the benefits of flexibility, scalability and end-user satisfaction.
Identifying performance slowness in early phases of PoC & pilot can help avoid cost overrun and remediation downstream, thus mitigating the risk of VDI failure during production deployment. Monitoring and capturing performance metrics is the key to VDI success as it sends problem alerts in advance, assuring peak performance.

The full article is at  http://www.informationweek.in/virtualization/13-05-16/your_7-step_guide_for_a_highly_effective_vdi_environment.aspx?page=2

 

Co-creation in Infra Management Services

There has been lot of focus on co-creation of late….The co-creation model goes beyond the conventional service provider model.  In Infrastructure management, co-creation aims to leverage the best of capabilities of customer, technology partners and service providers.

Co-creation is the next step of collaboration. It is about working with the customer and partner ecosystem to jointly charter new territories. In the co-creation approach, the service provider, the technology partner and the client organization need to take a strategic view of the initiatives. The service provider should be trusted with as much access as possible to customer’s environment, stakeholders and business problems.

Co-creation assumes more significance in infrastructure management because it is typically a mission critical and 24/7 service. There is no possibility of operating in an off-line or test mode. Hence, every incident or ticket is critical. One is only as good as the last ticket. This calls for extraordinary service delivery capabilities and collaboration with the client and the ecosystem of technology partners. In our context, co-creation calls for world class self-service and automation environments for the clients’ IT infrastructure needs.

The full content is available at

http://www.indiacocreates.com/4/post/2013/05/microland-co-creates-infrastructure-management-services-with-self-service-and-service-delivery-automation.html

 

 

Are you present where your prospective Employees are- Get on to Social Media and meet them NOW

I was at a Premium B-school couple of weeks back and the most noticeable trend was presence of smart phones with almost all of them. What strikes you is that these are the people who were born in late eighties and early nineties and have experienced no world without internet!!

Now this population is coming into the professional work arena and it is a tough and a difficult ask to keep in touch with them and persuade them to join you. Given the interesting mix of opportunities, expectations and connectivity available, it is imperative to look for most innovative ways to present your corporate credentials and keep connected with them as existing and prospective employees.

Talent acquisition is growing to be a very specialized job by each passing day and branding focused on employees both current and prospective is a big challenge to surmount.

However with online becoming the de-facto place to connect, research and review, it is critical for an employer to leverage online space to its maximum advantage. One can use online channels to hear and speak in equal measures and can create a comprehensive strategy to be seen as an ideal place to be.

Some methods which we can employ to get to impress prospective employees (Pun intended!!) are as follows-

Check your online Brand image-

More and more companies have well populated pages on sites like Glassdoor. Your employees are out there giving feedback about the company. It is worth checking regularly on what rating and comments your company is getting online. For a new employee, no feedback is better than hearing from your potential co-workers on what they think and you bet, candidates are referring to these sites before they make a decision to join you. So it’s a very worthwhile exercise to look for and protect your online brand image with the review sites. It will give you lots of free pointers as well on how to work on your current employee perceptions too and that is a big plus.

Leverage channels like LinkedIn and Facebook-

A thriving company pageon LinkedIn which has employees posting comments and updates regularly is a good signal that the company has a committed workforce. While it is important to create a page and post important updates, it is equally critical to engage your current work- population on these channels. It is not only a good place for them to see their company’s activities focused on outside world but also a place for them to contribute in their own right. No better way to impress a prospective employee than your current employees being the Brand Ambassadors.

Facebook offers similar opportunities as well. While LinkedIn could be the professional network, FB could connect with the employees in a more personal manner. The best place to showcase your employees as a community is FB. It has to be leveraged consciously and without intruding into the employees’ privacy.

These social media pages will work beautifully as a testimonial for any prospects.

Video Channels-

Have you evaluated YouTube channels? Post your events videos, small celebrations like birthday awards ceremony etc. on your channel. This is nothing short of your company TV available 24*7 for your current and prospective employees. Of course the sensitivity around the confidentiality has to be kept in mind but there are enough and more events which can be placed on your video channels to give optimum results.

Alumni Networks-

This is another much underutilized channel for showcasing a company’s credentials for prospective employees. Nothing better than your ex-employees saying very good things about the company and making recommendations. It is an important channel to build and it can give exceptional results.

All these activities and channels can be a goldmine for attracting the right talent and presenting a comprehensive and coherent picture. However like all mines this too will need lots of digging and hard work before one can see the results. These are worthwhile investments to make given the Human Capital Markets are getting tougher and tougher and it is critical to get to the winners, impress upon them one’s credentials and have them to come and add value to your company.

Article can be read at

http://marketing.siliconindia.com/marketing-expert/Are-you-present-where-your-prospective-Employees-are-Get-on-to-Social-Media-and-meet-them-NOW-eid-499.html

Content Is the King- How to Leverage Content for Increased Effectiveness of B2B Marketing

Technology has been fast transforming every single function in an organization, while most of the obvious ones related to infrastructure and employees get talked about a lot; Marketing function too has been getting fully transformed with the usage of technology. Customer connect has never been so easy and so real-time in the past. The importance of being connected and having the right content created and delivered has been growing by leaps and bounds.

With the mix of social media and digital marketing coming into play, completely untapped and high potential channels of communication have opened up as well. While the importance of this has been chronicled well in the B2C context, B2B marketers too are in an enviable position now to leverage good content across the channels. In this new connected world, content has become the most potent tool to reach out to your customers from the B2B perspective.

Thought leadership and knowledge are very strong differentiators in B2B context and propagating this positioning through the right channels is equally important. While most of the leading companies in any space may have similar value propositions and presentations etc., well-constructed content to augment a company’s position as an expert has its weight worth in gold. In today’s time of information overload and seemingly similarity of messaging, it is important to showcase a company’s knowledge and expertise and create the right differentiators with the target audience. Some ways in which content can be leveraged well are as follows-

White papers-

A well written white paper with the focus on solving the business and technology problem for the target market, works well. Ideally the focus should be on the business benefits with the company message woven in a subtle way in the right context. Many times, though companies end up focusing a lot on their solution and end up making it as marketing collateral, which may not be a good idea.  It is better to keep the message as neutral as possible. It makes the paper more credible and works well with the target audience.

Case Studies-

These can be targeted both at existing customers and the new prospects.  Here again the content has to be packaged well to solve the business problems. The business problem being solved has to be as prominent as how it is being solved. The trap many case studies fall under is the excessive focus on how.  These end up focusing too much on how the problem was solved and in turn do not connect with the audience.

Social Media-

This is a very powerful channel to connect with your target audience.  Well-designed Facebook and LinkedIn pages can add to a company’s positioning tremendously. Targeted messages with the right hooks can make the engagement very powerful.  Very technical topics too can be made very engaging. Daily tips, best practices, quizzes etc. are some of the tools which can be employed with high effectiveness.  These can be used to promote your website and related content too. Humor is important too; jokes on your focus topics are a good idea to try once in a while. For example, an event can be promoted using both LinkedIn groups and FB Pages. Regular updates, registrations etc. can be driven through these channels.

Twitter is another interesting channel which can be leveraged to communicate with the target audience. However this could be best utilized as a teaser or trailer, especially from a thought leadership perspective. This could be used for sharing tips, sharing announcements or news items etc. For example, you could leverage Twitter to announce the launch of an event; it could be leveraged to share updates etc.

The most important point to keep in mind is that content written for Social media should be presented in such a way that it can easily become viral.

Videos-

Podcasts is another interesting idea to demonstrate knowledge and disseminate interesting information. Many companies have been using it very effectively. This can be in different formats, formal or informal or in different sizes too like a 2-3 minutes one or detailed ones for 10-12 minutes depending on the target audience.

To summarize, content has become the king, especially to position a company as the thought leader in its chosen field.  But packaging the content too has become a complex art given the various options available in front of a Marketer. Ability to package and market the content in all byte sizes to maximum effect across different channels makes one a deft Marketer. Connecting with customers has never been so exciting.

 

This article was published in Silicon India Magazine last month. Here is the link…

http://marketing.siliconindia.com/marketing-expert/Content-Is-the-King-How-to-Leverage-Content-for-Increased-Effectiveness-of-B2B-Marketing-eid-477.html

 

 

 

 

Interesting Advertisements

In today’s time, it is next to impossible not to catch celebrities like Dhoni, Sachin, Shahrukh or Amitabh selling something or other on TV. If not them then you are bound to be encountering the female counterparts like Katrina, Kareena etc. in the same slot.

That’s why it is very refreshing to see some new ads delivering the message with the punch and with no celebrities. Couple of these ads which catch the eye are latest Idea and ICICI Prudential ones.
Idea in fact has not used their usual celebrity endorser and moved to the telephone exchange theme ad where a son exchanges the handsets of his parents with a really good message hitting home, literally!! The ad catches your attention with the theme and message very well and stops at What an Idea!! It’s another matter that you miss the word Sirji after that…

Another one which I found very impressive is the ICICI Prudential “Bande Achche hain” ad. A catchy score to go with a good theme of caring men (for a change!!) makes this doubly enjoyable. In fact they are also running this as an innovative song request ad on radio which works well as a reinforcement.

Great to see ads riding on good themes and messages and generating recalls based on the core message rather than solely riding on a celebrity. Goes on to prove that a good message can be delivered effectively irrespective of whether you have a celebrity endorsing it or not.

Here are the videos…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1Et_KvsL9w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RPweg-D7po

 

My Talk at Interop 2012 Mumbai

I had an interesting session at Interop 2012 in Mumbai. The topic was on “Hybrid Cloud Implications and Management”

Cloud as a buzzword has always been synonymous with Public Cloud. However the focus has been shifting to a combination of traditional IT environments and services from Public and Private Cloud which will be delivered and consumed via multiple delivery models, in short a Hybrid Cloud.

Hybrid Cloud promises greater control and security than a pure Public Cloud environment and greater flexibility than a Private Cloud environment through phenomenon like Cloud Bursting possible only in a Hybrid Cloud environment. The key in a Hybrid Cloud environment is the ability to achieve federation of data and resources between internal data centers, Private Cloud and Public Cloud. The complexity lies in enabling the enterprises with the ability to move data and resources between internal and third party data centers in a seamless manner with zero disruption in end user experience and service levels.

However Hybrid cloud Management comes with its own set of learnings and challenges like new Governance Models, Business processes, Risk Mitigation and Management, leveraging relevant tools and modified ITIL Methodologies to fit the cloud complexities. This session aimed to help Enterprises with framework for robust Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Management in their Environment.

Here are couple of pics too….

Maximizing the value of cloud-based development and testing environment- Article in Informationweek

Historically, development and testing environments have been built and managed at the project level, and often remain underfunded, under-resourced and underutilized for significant periods of time. The development and testing demand and the IT infrastructure management processes differ in their DNA. Development and testing is unpredictable and has variable demand cycles while the IT managers look at smoother predictable operations, gradual capacity building and higher utilization. Despite being a crucial IT function, the inability to quickly provide the capacity needed by development and testing teams delays the application development life cycle and hampers the delivery of an application quickly and efficiently.

As the pace of change and the level of competition is growing, businesses today need agile IT environment to match the highly dynamic and resource intensive needs of the application development and testing – a business critical function.

According to Gartner, cloud and mobility will drive the worldwide application development market to exceed USD 10 billion in 2013. By leveraging cloud, developers, test engineers, and QA teams can develop and perform extensive scenario testing in shorter cycles. Here’s how:

Cloud provides developers and test engineers with a self-service model for requesting and almost instantly receiving resources from within a pool of secured, shared and scalable infrastructure resources. This capability can shave days or even weeks off of application development project times, speeding time to market. Cloud also enables these teams to build configuration templates and machine snapshots in seconds, run them in parallel, and customize them to meet the needs.

Test engineers can quickly deploy configurations and scale performance on-demand heavy load testing, saving time and operational costs over traditional on-premise development and testing environments.
Benefits of moving development and testing to the cloud include: • Achieve faster time-to-market and greater flexibility for new products and services. • Automate approval workflows and reduce the cost of IT infrastructure management. • Enhance ID & Access control and safeguard data with a private or a hybrid solution. • Utilize infrastructure capacity efficiently with granular monitoring and management of infrastructure resources.

Considerations for cloud-based development and testing

While development and testing in a cloud-based model addresses the traditional roadblocks of cost, scalability, and lack of process and methodology, it has its own challenges:

Security & Control – Businesses may have applications that need to comply with regulatory and corporate restrictions around security and data privacy for e.g. access control for offshore and sub-contractors or an applicable local law that mandates compliance to data residency and hence restricts usage of a public cloud for data/devices. These may not even move to an off-premise cloud instance for development and testing because of proprietary/legacy systems, as well as intellectual property security considerations. In addition, control & governance mechanism needs to be set for integrating workflows, identity management, usage metering, chargeback, etc. to ensure efficiency and quality.

Interoperability – Businesses may be confronted with issues surrounding legacy systems development & testing on the cloud as connecting to legacy systems from the external cloud may pose interoperability issues. The ability to integrate with existing systems and share data between different platforms may need multi-tier technology architecture.

Performance – As development and testing environment on cloud maybe shared by numerous users, there may be cases where businesses may have to wait for the required bandwidth. Uptime is an important consideration when developing and testing on the cloud to assess the performance characteristics of an application. The IT admins have to ensure that underlying hardware provides adequate performance levels across storage, network and compute in a private cloud, while such tweaking may not be available in a public cloud.

Monitoring – Monitoring of application, which is in a distributed format, one spanning multiple servers, on multi-cloud environment or accessing multiple applications through web services, becomes difficult from a performance, security and availability perspective. A full-featured logging and tracing mechanism for troubleshooting becomes imperative. Measuring the cloud utilization by various teams and business units enables better capacity planning for future.

Management – Servicing and managing development and testing environment has been challenging because of the bursty workloads and the dynamic service requests. The current processes are designed around current IT service delivery models. The processes such as provisioning, procurement, configuration and de-provisioning of the resources are manpower intensive at the transactional levels and automation is limited by the technology. While cloud provides a wide variety of build/integration systems, test harnesses, and development and testing tools, there is still a need to bring all of this together in a turnkey and managed model to reduce the burden of managing development and testing infrastructure on cloud.

Developing for the cloud

– Developing applications to run on cloud is different from developing applications for a traditional or virtualized IT environment. Developers must build applications that consider resource unavailability and is able to recover from such incidences. For e.g. a multi-tier application should be loosely coupled and ready for any other tier failure. The application should be built in a way that allows multiple instances of a component to run concurrently so that in case an instance fails, the components could easily switch to another instance.

Critical Success Factors

A thorough planning and selecting the right technology and cloud service provider must be done in order to maximize the value of the cloud-based development and testing environment.

To understand cloud-ready environments, some key architectural requirements of a cloud-based development and testing environment must be known:

• What hardware/compute resources will be used and will it be capable of achieving development and testing objective?
• What resources (wiring and cabling, SAN and storage, rack space etc.) will be needed before any servers or workloads are installed?
• What networking and data storage capabilities in terms of capacity will be required?
• What workloads/applications will be placed in the cloud?

Businesses must make sure that the cloud-based development and testing environment is aptly architected for hybrid environment and does not lead to application performance degradation.

Once the development and testing environment in the cloud is established, businesses must take into consideration the following to ensure an agile development and testing life cycle:

• Template library of ready-to-use VMs, defining server, capacity & storage requirements along with application components, must be created. Such templates allow team members to quickly duplicate environments and streamline provisioning.
• Services in the cloud should be integrated with the right chargeback/metering processes and tools. This will enable enterprises with the financial thresholds and control of costs in the development and testing cloud.

A comprehensive cloud solution for development and testing provides increased control over projects, speed of deployment, ease of collaboration, and the ability to access environments on demand, enabling efficient and quality application development and testing.

The complete article can be read at

http://www.informationweek.in/cloud_computing/13-02-08/maximizing_the_value_of_cloud-based_development_and_testing_environment.aspx