In part one of this three part series, I covered the first five items I have found to help make VDI deployments successful.  Now let’s cover the final four items:

1. Plan for future growth.  Don’t spend all the money up front.  Design the infrastructure for growth and budget for cyclical upgrades.  Perhaps you skimp on the storage during the pilot, but set aside money in subsequent quarters for additional drives/shelves.  Leave room for additional RAM in the hosts and set aside money to purchase that RAM later.  You will never know for sure where all the bottlenecks are during the design phase, so having a quarterly upgrade budget will allow for easier resolution of unexpected bottlenecks.
2. Don’t expect the solution to be perfect on day one.  Of course we will all strive for it, but prepare for a rocky road to start out with.  Hope for the best, but expect the worst.  How will you handle grumpy accountants?  What is the best approach for the doctors who don’t feel like they need to comply?  Do you plan to teach the customer service representatives all about their new environment before you even turn it over to them?  Secondarily, budget or prepay for your consultant to come back on site during or after the launch.  This way you can have your (hopefully trusted) consultant available to help with any odd issues that may pop up.  My sales team will often pitch a block of hours to our customers during the presales phase for this specific purpose.  If all goes well, our customers can use this prepaid time to do a six month review of the implementation, help design the next phase, clean up group policy, or help with something else totally unrelated to the VDI environment.
3. Manage your users as closely as you manage your infrastructure.  Train them ahead of time on any changes they’ll need to endure.  Be ready to have technical feet on the floors when they go live on the new system and make sure those feet carry a smile along with them.  Try and utilize superusers in each department to augment the technical staff.  These people will best understand the intersection of business process and technical infrastructure and will be more trusted by the end users.
4. Ask your consultant ahead of time what you can do to prepare your current environment to make the implementation go smoothly.  If you can predefine all the IPs you need before hand, you’ll save valuable time that will greatly benefit everyone later.  I have a document I have developed over the last couple of years that details out exactly what will need to be done to their existing environment so I don’t have to deal with it when I get on site.  I simply make sure the document gets into their hands a week before the project starts and we can start right away with installing the VDI components.

In the final post of this series, I’ll cover a few things I’ve found that can severely harm a VDI project.

I have recently wrapped up my most successful View deployment yet.  As I look back on the project and reflect on its success, I found this blog post writing itself.  In fact, it wrote itself so well, I plan on breaking it up into three different parts.  

Here are the first five items I have found to be critical success factors I in this and several other projects I consider successful:

1. Trust your consultants.  Keep them on board and informed through the entire process.  Make sure they understand both IT’s goals and the business’s goals.
2. Deliver a complete infrastructure.  It doesn’t have to be completely greenfield, but it should be well planned and completely integrated.  Duct tape should not be taken out of the toolbox for this project.
3. Run a complete and thorough proof of concept and pilot.  Nothing beats running the proposed infrastructure for real.  You might find it won’t work and have to throw away all the time and money, but that’s better than building the entire environment and have to make it work due to the size of the investment.  This also helps you to see around all the vendor half-truths and smokescreens and get a true appreciation of the capabilities of each of the products in the solution.
4. Don’t mold VDI into your current processes, take a fresh approach to both and design and deliver them as a single package. This includes both business and IT processes.  If you can, introduce it along with another major process disrupter.  If you’re introducing a new CRM package that completely changes the way the organization will manage its data, introduce your new VDI processes at the same time.  One is bound to fail if you try to retrain your users twice, so why not completely turn them upside down and only train them once?
5. Completely understand your infrastructure.  A consultant may have designed and built most of your solution, but you need to support it.  Learn all you can from the consultant while you can.  Attach to their hip and don’t allow yourself to be distracted.  Ask where the weak spots are and where the bottlenecks will be.  If you develop a good rapport with the engineer, you’ll learn stuff that the pre-sales team won’t give up easily.  This will lead us into the next tip, but you’ll have to wait for the next post.

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, or F.U.D., is a term I seem to have really come to use a lot lately.  It’s a marketing approach that seems to transcend industries.  You see it in politics as one candidate tries to undermine his/her opponents (in politics it’s usually called mud-slinging), in the battles between the cable/Internet/phone providers (here in Omaha it’s between Cox Communications and Qwest Communications), in advertisements for cleaning products (what percentage of germs does Clorox kill compared to Lysol) and of course within our own beloved IT industry.

Recent examples of IT FUD (at least in the infrastructure realm) have included, but definitely not limited to:

• Microsoft/Citrix v. VMware –hypervisor and virtual desktop/application infrastructure
• Vizioncore v. Veaam – The especially heated virtualization backup and management realm
• HP v. Dell v. IBM v. Cisco – “<insert company name> is the best, purpose-built platform for virtualization”
• HP v. EMC v. NetApp – the ongoing storage wars

All of the above mentioned companies deserve their place towards the top of the heap in their respective piles, which of course leads to very heated debate.  This debate unfortunately tends to boil over into FUD territory.

Having spent time as both a customer and a partner (though not a vendor), I definitely appreciate one company telling me the pros and cons of both their product and their competitor’s product.  In fact, I would doubt the aptitude of a vendor who didn’t have a competitive fact sheet for each of their products.  Where FUD comes into play is when the comparisons are overly tilted, based on half-truths or flat out lies and presented to a customer as an unerring truth.

Let’s take the recent trend of the Tolly reports and similar vendor-sponsored “independent” studies.  I use quotes around the word independent due to the fact that the third party is receiving money from only one of the competitors.  That breeds an inherent perception of a conflict of interest, which in my opinion instantly taints the report whether or not one truly does exist.

It is also well known that when a vendor performs or commissions someone else to perform a head-to-head comparison, that the tests that will be run will favor the features of that vendor’s product.  As a nonspecific example, let’s look at a storage bake-off.  Vendor A sets up a performance test between its array and Vendor B’s array.  The load that is put against both arrays could favor the caching algorithm that Vendor A’s array uses, thereby ensuring which array will perform the best.

Another aspect of FUD is the constant hammering of a competitor’s flaws, while totally ignoring any advantages their competitor may have.  You see this in the ever popular side-by-side feature comparison tables.  Two of my favorites are the VMware View v. Citrix XenDesktop feature set battles.

Wow, View sure is more feature rich, isn’t it?

Hold on there, apparently Citrix offers me more unique features.

See what I mean?  Clearly each vendor is focusing solely on the negatives of their competition, and in some cases not highlighting their best features. Also notice that VMware favors the least impactive of the competitors.

Next is the outright lie or deception.  This clearly falls into the Dirty category.  This will always occur, but in any healthy community it should quickly be knocked out of the sky.  So much of the IT industry is based on facts and numbers, so this doesn’t happen much, but it is definitely resident within politics (ever heard of a dirty politician?) where the facts and issues fall more into shades of gray.  These shades of gray make it harder to use facts to counter claims, especially when people’s emotions are thoroughly invested.

Finally, I’d like to highlight some fun that can be had with FUD.  As an example, I’d like to point out Doug Hazelman’s post here: http://veeammeup.com/2010/05/fud-for-thought.html.  Sure he’s being blatantly competitive and even admits to FUD flinging, but he also isn’t pretending that he’s giving an unbiased opinion.  FUD can also lead to great debates like we saw between VMware’s Scott Drummonds and Citrix’s Simon Crosby.  There is also a trend on Twitter and on some blogs of individuals who can transcend the Kool-Aid and have fun with their respective employer’s marketing companies along with their competitors’.  The Twiiter jabbing between Chad Sakacc and Vaugn Stewart is a perfect and perpetual example of this.  Both give credit where it is due and use sound technical arguments when disagreements appear.  Outcomes like these can turn FUD into something that actually benefits the community as a whole, but take a special set of individuals and circumstances.

So what can we do to wade through the mire that FUD creates in our decision making process?  To me it’s always been a matter of using the purely marketing information as a guidepost; a way to decide where my time would be best spent researching a set of competing products.  If Vendor A says their product is better because they don’t rely solely on SATA disks like Vendor B does, then I know I need to spend some time with the facts, trusted blog sites, a spreadsheet and possibly a lab to determine if there is some merit to using a large array of SATA disks verses a smaller array of SAS disks.  Companies do things because they think it’s a better way to do them, it’s up to us to determine if it really is a better mousetrap.

I like the way Wikipedia states it: "To dispel FUD, the easiest way is to ask for details and then provide well researched, hard facts which disproves the details.”  That clearly was written to help dispel a competitor’s FUD, but how does a consumer dispel the FUD coming from both directions?  I suggest not depending on marketing materials and asking for details from both (or all) parties, and then provide your own research and hard facts to make a fair comparison.

Anyone trying to sell you something is guilty of some of these things, though some may be more trustworthy than others.  Just remember, you must use your best judgment to make an informed decision that you can live with and defend, just like you should be doing in politics. 

I first want to apologize to all of you who were looking forward to additional posts about our VMUG setup back in March.  I ended up only having my complete environment for about a week after the VMUG before I had to yank it out of my data center and set it up at a customer site for a POC.  I still hope to get my hands on it again and do some posts on it.

In addition, I've been busy studying for certifications lately, which has left little time for blogging.  The good news here is that I now have a Microsoft MCITP Enterprise Administrator certification and will soon have an HP Master ASE certification for Blades and Clustering.

The main reason I'm finally getting around to posting an update (and apology) is that today was the announcement of the first set of vEXPERTs for 2010 and I was lucky enough to be selected for a second year in a row!  The award says nothing about my technical skills directly, but is definitely still an honor in that it acknowledges my ability to communicate the awesomeness of VMware's products and vision. 

Thank you very much to John Troyer, the man-not-so-behind-the-curtain in all things VMware social media, for heading up and pushing this award program and all its benefits.  Another special thank you to VMware and the team of vExpert judges.

I already have another post in the works, so keep an eye out for that…