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Unexpected Benefits from Managed VDI

Val King
Posted by Val King on Jan 31, 2022 1:38:06 PM
As part of the process of improving managed VDI or published application performance for our clients, several benefits are consistently realized.

Some of the most common are very fast login times, very stable trouble-free Citrix or VMware Horizon environments, consistent patching, and many others. However, sometimes clients of Whitehat’s Managed VDI programs realize benefits far beyond what they were expecting.  

One Whitehat client is a global distributor providing components to some of the largest manufacturers in the world. With 130+ offices around the globe, managed out of four regional headquarters, and maintaining IT operations for three subsidiaries, a big challenge for them is making sure the IT environment is always working. Because of the importance of maintaining their ability to process orders in real-time around the globe, to thousands of client manufacturing facilities, disaster recovery has become an important layer of protection to ensure 24/7 operations.

To meet these rigorous uptime requirements, semi-annual disaster recovery exercises are conducted, where all business middleware, mainframe, and intranet sites are restored to a secondary DR site and validated to confirm operations can continue successfully in the event of a true disaster. Because of the size and scope of the engagement, to execute this semi-annual test, hotel and travel accommodations must be made for a significant number of IT personnel required to execute the test and validate the results upon completion.

When Whitehat took on ownership of Citrix for this client, we took on the responsibility to provide staffing twice a year to travel and perform the work needed relating to Citrix for this test. The first such test began on a Thursday and was completed by Sunday night. As is common when first beginning an engagement, Citrix was in poor shape, and as a result, the full DR testing had not been as extensive in recent years because the poor performance significantly limited the time available to complete the restoration and do full validation testing. The process Whitehat experienced initially did not successfully restore the full environment, was not repeatable without a lot of manual intervention, and required staff with very thorough knowledge of the environment to execute. All these things could be problems, or might not even be possible, in a real DR event.

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Reviewing requirements for what the client considered a successful DR event, and reviewing the Citrix environment’s role in the testing, Whitehat was able to identify several gaps in the process and resolve them. Once the process was fixed, and the Citrix environment improved to better meet its role, Whitehat began looking for opportunities to optimize the existing process. With optimizations in place, the environment restores were less dependent on the knowledge and skill of the traveling IT staff, allowing for dramatic improvements in recovery time.

With Citrix removed as a primary risk in the restoration process, it was no longer a bottleneck in the process. With the work done to make this significant improvement, the semi-annual DR exercise no longer required a large team of highly skilled IT team members. DR testing could also be completed by lower-level IT resources and no longer required a lot of tribal knowledge of the environment to be successful.

Our client said, "We can now focus on making sure our business apps restore correctly and whether the hardware can support everyone, instead of having to spend so much time on worrying about whether or not users can connect at all with Citrix."

Now, with a completely transformed, stable, consistent, and fast Citrix environment, the role Citrix played in creating the limitations in the DR process is gone. The travel time has been cut or eliminated, and lower-level IT resources can execute the full test successfully. This was only possible due to the optimization, speed, and efficiency of the Citrix restoration process. The DR process is now completely repeatable without unforeseen issues that occurred in every previous DR. In the event of a real DR scenario, the client can breathe a bit easier knowing they have a consistent, repeatable process to make sure IT operations continue in a record amount of time. The process has gone from many days of the best-and-brightest executing the DR process, to a near zero-travel routine event, that could be executed more frequently than semi-annually, if desired, with very little additional work.

The added cost to the client from Whitehat? Zero! All this effort was covered by the existing agreement, but the benefit was massive for a company generating almost $20,000 in revenue, every minute, 24 hours a day, making sure their clients’ manufacturing lines around the world never stop due to a lack of parts. This example is just one of many that demonstrate the unexpected benefits of engaging with Whitehat Virtual for managed VDI and improving your VDI infrastructure.

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Topics: End User Experience, Virtual Desktop (VDI), VDI, Desktop Virtualization, disaster recovery, managed VDI

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