Have you been facing lags with your VDI?
You must be all too familiar with instances when using a virtual machine causes you inconvenience or even outright irritation. Some issues that many VDI users face are:
- Slow application response time and frequent lags
- Lengthy-time for Windows to boot
- Cursor freezes
- Issues with audio, video, or graphics
- Antivirus software that locks the virtual machine
These are all problems that VDI users are often heard complaining about. And as with any emerging technology, VDI is a solution that evolves and improves rapidly. There are several ways to improve your VDI performance.
4 Ways to Make Your VDI Run Smooth:
1. Server Performance Monitoring
Many new users look at VDI as a “black box,” a mysterious object about which they have very little understanding and can’t look inside. While there’s no doubt that it is a complicated technology, there is no reason to assume that the only constant state of user experience will be a poor one.
In the last few years, with the surge in demand and usage of VDI, many software manufacturers have emerged with robust monitoring tools. These tools are aimed at improving the end-user experience by monitoring the load on the server and its resources. Server performance monitoring includes tracking CPU, memory, and input/output Utilization. It provides crucial data related to the total burden on a server. It relays information about peak loads.
We use this data to optimize your server resources. Resources that are in a state of shortage are identified and increased by implementing server upgrades or making additional deployments. It depends on the requirement and the level of shortage, as evidenced by the monitoring data.
The monitoring data also comes in handy when planning for the future. Speculating on future resource needs becomes easy because trends in resource usage are available. This makes future resource deployment for improving capacity a cake-walk.
2. Understanding the Network
Because of issues with the network, VDI performance is very often compromised. It can be due to mistakes in gauging bandwidth considerations or a lack of proper network segmentation.
The network is the backbone of the virtual desktop environment, constantly active and holding up the entire infrastructure. The network is responsible for user access to the Virtual Machine. It provides a connection to the data center and the management, monitoring, and administrative tools that need the network to function. The network is the bond through which communication with server storage takes place, provides a secure connection with the user’s endpoint device, and most importantly, it ensures a stable and fast connection to the internet. These activities use “space” on the network.
Proper network segmentation would mean that separate categories of activities, such as storage traffic, VM traffic, or management traffic, are all on separate network segments. Now, it can be ensured that management tasks don’t hinder user experience.
Another step in understanding the network is monitoring the client’s network performance to reveal the bandwidth demands of each particular virtual desktop. It helps in identifying network bottlenecks that impact the performance of the virtual machines. With this data, repurposing the network and enhancing the critical network segments can be optimized.
It improves the resilience of the network and makes it more stable while also being flexible in terms of segmentation. Similar to server monitoring, network monitoring also illustrates trends in bandwidth usage and traffic, allowing for scheduled upgrades before performance suffers.
3. Reducing Desktop Display Requirements
Issues with display performance are another common complaint heard from users of virtual desktops. Virtual desktops are different from local processors, which handle graphic tasks on the PC. Virtual desktops render screens on the server and then pass the relevant data back to the endpoint device for displaying the image. It’s a complicated and long-winded process, and while modern display protocols have vastly improved performance in recent years, visually intensive programs are still a heavy load on the server and the network. This adversely impacts desktop performance.
The solution is to reconfigure the demands of the desktop’s display capacity and reduce the visual requirements of applications. This solution is only viable for enterprises without intensive display requirements. But except in the case of specialized industries, reducing display demands will not adversely impact business functions. It will greatly enhance the user experience, which is a proven way of improving productivity.
One way to go about doing this is to reduce the display resolution, which reduces the amount of server memory required to buffer and display a certain image or video. It has a direct impact on bandwidth utilization. Another method is to display videos on small screens instead of the full-screen mode. This will also ease bandwidth constraints.
4. Using VDI-Compatible Anti-Virus
Virtual servers require a different kind of antivirus. Most organizations will adopt virtualization technologies but will fail to change the way they deploy antivirus and malware protection.
In a traditional physical environment, each instance of antivirus will have complete access to all the resources of the machine on which it is installed. Even in this case, we as users have come to accept a certain amount of performance degradation. In the case of a virtual environment, the servers share the resources of a single host, and those antivirus scans prove to be a huge resource burden when multiple scans take place at the same time using the resources of the same physical host. This causes performance and user experience to suffer terribly.
The solution to this exists on the market in the form of virtualization-aware antivirus. These are mature technological solutions, widely in use within IT organizations. Each provider can have a different approach to building intelligent antivirus. One solution could be to ensure that all virtual machines perform scans at different times. Or to run the antivirus scans at the hypervisor level and eliminate the burden on the virtual machine on the user’s operating system.
The performance enhancement from adopting this approach and changing the structure of antivirus on your virtual desktops is huge and highly recommended.
Conclusion:
The steps stated above are sure-shot ways to improve VDI performance along with your experience. Make sure to discuss these details with your IT expert and service provider!
ACE provides Cloud VDI that runs faster than desktops. Optimum end-user experience is our top priority. Take this opportunity to try out ACE’s Cloud VDI Performance.
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