Virtualisation of Servers and VDI with VMWare, Citrix or any other technology still has many moving parts.

After working in the value add space for Virtualisation products, mostly VMWare but more and more Xen Server and Hyper V - we still constantly get asked about how to fault find performance issues.  Over and over again I see IT staff being limited to their thinking that just one tool is required to do all.

Well - I don't need to tell you that this is a very complex area of technology and to this day there does not appear to be a "Single" solution platform that does all you need.  I often talk about comparing "security assurance" - how many different products do you employ to ensure your systems are secure; certainly not just one.  People I talk to continually try to "pigeon hole" a product to be like something they are familiar with.

So let me cover some examples of what I am talking about.  We are fortunate to have in our stable of products some of the best VMWare analysis and monitroing tools available.

What do you need to know?

Let us focus first on typical standard server virtualisation.
Assessement of what will virtualise and proper sizing of host. Guest CPU/Memory/Disk requirements.
Assessment of required storage throughput - IOP's and latency.
Supporting network capacity and throughput; especially important of course for remote site support.  Of course this is supercritical with VDI.
Now, with VDI we not only need to ensure WAN connections work well but also what are VDI guests talking to both within the host and external - remembering that many of these devices may just be IP devices not running Windows or Linux.

So if the above is important, you not only need something that will assess the requirments to start with but also what the performance is like on going.  If you don't deliver good user experience; the project will fail.

So for the above points, look at each and ensure you have selected a great tool to deliver the information.

Worth noting for this in our set of products would be...

LiquidWareLabs for VDI assessment and on going user experience monitoring & reporting.

Xangati companions superbly as it has more focus on understanding what is happening at the hypervisor level and can report on network traffic for any IP device and even between VDI guests.

You can learn more about how to diagnose VMWare performance at TrackITOnline solution page.

Have a quick look at http://www.trackitonline.com.au/solutions/analyse-diagnose-a-report.html for some ideas.

Phil Lancaster