The Easiest Way to a Great VDI End User Experience Ever

VDI should be easy.  For nearly a decade, we have seen a healthy percentage of organizations struggle to deliver a measurably great VDI experience to their employees. According to our internal data, some 40 percent of these organizations do not have a “bad” experience but still struggle to unlock the full potential of the VDI environment they bought*. For proof of the complexity in the decisions to be made around VDI, we only need to look at some of the common questions that have historically taunted or tormented IT departments working on getting the VDI experience right, including the following:

• Did we buy the right hardware? Should we buy Dell, HP, Lenovo, Cisco, Nutanix, BOXX, or something else?
• How does Microsoft licensing work with virtual applications and VDI? What is a VDA?
• Is Citrix or VMware better?
• Does VDI benefit from having graphics cards? Should I buy them?
• Is the hardware sized right for your applications and use cases?
• Will VDI deliver a great end-user experience?
• What about our profiles?
• How do we handle printing and scanning?
• What about CAD applications or that person in accounting with that huge spreadsheet loaded with macros?
• What about memory? What do we need for storage? Will my applications work?
• Why is VDI slow?
• Will that home-grown legacy application really work in VDI?
• Do we need a NetScaler or what is now a Citrix ADC?

Even in the face of this evidence, we still believed VDI should be easy for companies to acquire and consume to further their goals and set about proving it was possible one client at a time. Delivering a great VDI experience has only grown more complicated with the pandemic changing the rules of the game – sending everyone home to work, placing new demands on VDI environments, like rich multi-media content delivery for remote training, and webcams helping isolated team members communicate with their peers. Many of today’s VDI environments struggle to deliver this type of content for one reason – most VDI environments were not designed to deliver this type of rich visual content in the first place. So, where is the easy button for VDI? After years of watching companies struggle with the above questions (and many more like them), we put our best to work solving the problem of how to make VDI easy for those that want or need the advantages of virtual applications and virtual desktops from Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and VMware Horizon. The answer came in the form of 100 percent self-contained VDI appliances. Citrix or VMware VDI-in-a-box and a simple six-step plan to help any organization get to an exceptional VDI experience.

1. Clients make a list of the applications and the general roles employees fill (accountants, salespeople, engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc.) with Whitehat’s help if needed.
2. Build and test critical applications in a dedicated proof of concept environment to remove any mystery of what the end-user experience will be like before buying anything.
3. Review the organization’s network to make sure it can do its part in delivering an excellent VDI experience.
4. One-hundred percent self-contained Citrix/VMware VDI-in-a-box appliances available with consumption, pay-as-you-consume billing, and guaranteed to deliver the right end-user experience, ship to any data center you choose. Nothing to calculate. Nothing to figure out. It’s all done for you.
5. With final in-place tuning, testing to confirm the end-user experience meets the expectation, and training for employees, the virtual desktop environment goes live.
6. Once live, the guarantees do not end. Whitehat is there 24/7/365, actively managing or co-managing the environment making sure VDI delivers the right experience every day.

Now we can truly say VDI is easy. There is no gauntlet of questions and data points to analyze to ensure success. There is only this six-step process, backed by guarantees, expertise, and a novel consumption payment model to keep it affordable. It is VDI, combining the best of every delivery method. There is the added security of having hardware live in the data center of your choice, the pay-as-you-consume pricing, 24/7/365 active management by experts dedicated to you, and VDI performance guarantees only available from Whitehat. Titanium HCI is the name of these self-contained VDI-in-a-box appliances designed to accommodate any VDI use case, including graphic-rich content (including BIM/CAD and other graphic-intense applications), webcams, and multi-media content. To learn more about these appliances and how Titanium HCI Citrix or VMware VDI-in-a-box appliances might fit your unique situation, contact us today!   *Having login times are well north of our average 19 seconds, or Citrix’s stated 40 seconds for enterprise customers, as an example.