Virtualizing desktops is one of the biggest transformations you’re likely to come across in your career as an IT professional. It doesn’t just touch every user, it touches every other IT discipline, too (storage, networks, apps, security, the works). Fortunately, you’re not the first one to virtualize desktops. Lots of very smart people have been there before and have learned the lessons. No matter where you are on your own desktop virtualization learning curve – or what stage of the deployment process you’re focused on – you’re going to get a lot out of the Citrix Desktop Virtualization Insights eBook.

1. Desktop
Virtualization
Deployment
Insights
Six experts
share their
advice
A Citrix eBook for project
owners and their teams

2. Been there,
done that, got the
standing ovation.
Deploying desktop
virtualization is a big deal.
For users, it enables mobility,
supports BYOD and delivers
a great desktop experience.
For IT, it’s a quantum leap
in agility, manageability
and security.
For the business, it’s a whole new
way of empowering workers and
responding to change.
Butmakenomistake:movingfrom
a physical desktop infrastructure
to a virtual one (or a hybrid) is a
real transformation that touches
almost every part of the enterprise
and the IT department.
You don’t waltz into something
this big as if you’re just changing
the light bulbs…

3. Project Accelerator does
just what it says
While we’ve captured some great
best-practice advice in this
eBook, we’ve captured much,
much more inside something
called Project Accelerator.
It’s a free, online project
management environment that
asks you a few questions about
your goals and users, then guides
you step-by-step through your
pilots, roll-outs and beyond (with
reference architectures, hardware
sizing, user segmentation… and
lots of fantastic documentation
and advice).
If you’re thinking about virtualizing
your desktops (or are already on
Control
your destiny
This eBook is about getting your desktop
transformation journey off to a great start.
It’s about the main principles that will
help you:
•Harvest the low-hanging fruit
• Deliver quick wins to the business
• Keep your users excited
• Arrive at your destination in great shape
• Get all the benefits that virtual desktops have to offer
To make it, we approached six desktop virtualization
industry experts who we respect, and asked them what
makes some deployments successful and others go
off the rails.
The insights we’re sharing here are based on hundreds
of real-world desktop transformation deployments.
These guys know what they’re talking about. And they’re
keen to help.
We hope you take some time to absorb these ideas and
bring them to your own virtualization projects.
Here’s to success.
Read the insights.
Then try the tool.
Project Accelerator
will help you manage
your entire desktop
virtualization project.

4. Meet the
Experts
Here are the experts who
contributed their insights
and experience to this eBook
(thanks guys). We’ll just use
their first names to attribute
their advice in the pages
that follow.
Nick Rintalan
Senior Architect
Citrix Consulting Services
Robert Morris
(@agsi_rmorris on twitter)
Virtualization Consultant and
Trainer (and CTP)Advantec
Global Services Inc. (AGSI)
Shane Kleinert
(@shanekleinert on twitter)
Solutions Architect
JDL Technologies
Jarian Gibson
(@jariangibson on twitter)
Virtualization Practice Manager
Choice Solutions LLC
Steve Greenberg
(@stevegreenberg on twitter)
Founder and Chief Architect
(and CTP) Thin Client Computing
Dan Allen
Lead Architect
Citrix Consulting Services

5. The Insights
Here are the big-picture
ideas that will multiply your
chances of a successful
desktop transformation
implementation…

6. “The key is to understand your
business needs first. Establish
your priorities. Understand
why the organization wants
to virtualize.”
Shane
“The most common mistake that
I see in virtualization projects?
Choosing to put in tech because
it’s cool. Every piece of technology
you implement has got to have
a good business case, a specific
business case.”
Robert
“Don’t let the IT tail wag the
business dog. Talk to the people
who do the day-to-day tasks
within the organization.
Find out what they really need
in order to be productive; then,
plug in the best technology to
add value for them.”
Steve
“Time to value is key. Do your use
case analysis up front so everyone
knows why you’re doing desktop
virtualization.”
Shane
“Starting out with the wrong
goals – or different goals – has the
power to kill any project. It kills the
excitement. The real benefits
in a virtualization project are
most often:
1. Speedier, more
efficient management
2. Greater IT flexibility
3. Faster time to market
Basically, you can do
stuff faster, and respond to
change more quickly.”
Robert
Start out
with clear
goals. It’s project management 101:
get management buy-in from
the start, by putting appropriate
goals in front of them.
Robert

7. Get your apps
in order.
“It’s especially important to test
any homegrown applications that
might not have been written for
a shared environment.”
Jarian
“Customers who struggle the
most with desktop virtualization
try to treat all applications the
same and virtualize them using
the same model.”
Nick
“Don’t cut corners here. That’s why
Citrix bought App-DNA to help
people get the app-compatibility
piece in place and make better
decisions.”
Dan
“Don’t take a bunch of crap from
your existing desktop environment
and simply put it in the data center
– you need to rationalize your apps
before tackling a desktop
virtualization project. Otherwise,
you’ll end up with image sprawl
and you’ll have the same crap in
your data center!”
Nick
“You need to analyze your
applications up front. Understand
where each app writes to. Does it
write to locations outside of the
user profile? Is it terminal services
or RDS compliant?”
Nick
“You can’t overlook application
compatibility testing before you
go too far down any virtualization
path. Tools like App-DNA can
help accelerate that and take the
manual work out of it.”
Jarian
“Application understanding is the
critical piece. You must know what
your users do; what apps they use;
how they use them; and where their
data lives.” Dan

8. “Virtualizing desktops
is a great opportunity for
application rationalization.
You may find that you have
5000 apps, but only really
use or need 500.”
Nick
“It’s essential to start with an
application inventory. And it’s
a great time to rationalize and
consolidate your apps. Then
it’s much easier to centralize the
apps you’re bringing forward.”
Shane
“Dig deeper to find out what
applications are in use and
are mission critical. This is
a very common blind spot for
organizations. It often takes
a neutral, outside party to get
a clear picture of the real app
list. Some of the newer tools
help quite a bit but there is no
substitute for making direct
contact with the end users.”
Steve

9. If your
users aren’t
happy, you’re
dead.”Shane
“You need to be serious about
gathering user requirements and
understanding their work and their
demands. At the end of the day,
if the users aren’t happy, your
project will fail.”
Jarian
“The first step is to segment your
user base. If you don’t know what
users are doing and what apps
they’re using, you have no clue.”
Nick
“You can use survey tools to help
automate discovery of your user
base. But there’s no substitute for
sending a person to the field to sit
down and talk to the users and
their managers.
Ask them to launch the apps they
use. Look at their desktops. Look
at the drive mappings and learn
how their desktop is configured.”
Dan
“You need to work with people.
Sit side-by-side and demo the
environment for them. Show
them they can still customize
their desktop; still have the photo
of their kids on it; still access all
their data and apps…”
Jarian
“The human element is really
important here. Sending
questionnaires to lots of branches
doesn’t really give you everything.
I much prefer 1- to 2-day site
surveys with users, collecting
real-world data.”
Dan
“You can’t meet every user but
you can pick 4-5 managers and
4-5 power users out of 400-500
people and spend an hour
with each.”
Dan
“Get your eyes on the workflow
of the end user, learn what they
do each day and how you can
help them. IT projects usually fail
because they’re disconnected
from what the business really
does and what it needs to improve.
We often get hired to do one thing
and then – after observing end
users – change the approach.
Sometimes the killer app can be
as simple as better folder
structures or fixing profiles.”
Steve
Know your users.

10. “You can get crazy with over-
segmentation though. It’s usually
possible to consolidate down to a
cluster of groups of users that
share the key dimensions – even if
they’re not in the same office or
department.”
Shane
“It’s good to go for the low-hanging
fruit first. You get the easy wins
and get the buzz going so users get
excited about virtualization instead
of fearing it will ruin their world.”
Jarian
“It’s key to understand the various
use cases and provide the right
technologies to service each
one. However, behind the scenes
it is also important to identify
commonalities. Often user cases
that seem very different may only
vary by a few apps, or by their
preferred access method.”
Steve
“Segmentingyouruserbaseletsyou
choose the right delivery model for
every user group – to make sure
the model you choose actually
supports what that group does.”
Shane
And put them
into groups.
“We always
use two or
three delivery
models”
Shane

11. Proactively manage change
in the organization.
“I’m a techie. I love technology.
But after years and years of doing
this, I’ve come to realize that
there’s going to be a human being
that is ultimately using this
technology. And people will help
you if they feel heard and valued.”
Dan
“It’s important to brand the effort
internally and give the customer
a stake in the process. Oftentimes
just including users and
departments in naming
the project can foster enthusiastic
support. Make the project name a
buzz word, and a rallying force,
in the organization. Create
excitement and buy-In! This is one
place where marketing can really
help IT.”
Steve
“It’s important during the testing
stage to give really responsive
support to users. Their experience
now will give them a taste of the
future.”
Shane
“There’s a marketing element
to this.You can make a solution,
but if no one cares about it,
it’ll just sit there.”
Steve

12. What’s in it for users?
“With virtualization, they can be back up
and running in minutes from a new endpoint.
They like the sound of that.
They also like flexible working. Knowing
you can be productive wherever you need
to work.
And virtualization lets them bring their own
devices. So the college kids coming in get to
use their shiny new Macbook Pro instead of
the clunky old PC – and still get access to all
the company apps.”
Jarian
“My standard questions to users are: 1) What
do you do today? 2) What challenges do you
have and what could be better? 3) If we could
wave a magic wand and make it do whatever
you want, what would that be?
Most of the time the answers to 3) are exactly
what we can do with application and desktop
virtualization, users just don’t know these
things are already possible.”
Steve

13. Pick the right
deployment models.
“The idea of mapping FlexCast
models to your user segments
isn’t the first thought of many
project managers – but it
ought to be.”
Shane
“Some other vendors only have
a VDI model so they skew people’s
thinking by marketing that model
as if it’s synonymous with desktop
virtualization. It’s not. There’s
much more to it.”
Nick
“Persistent desktops – the full VDI
model – are a hungry beast.
Memory and disk footprint and
IOPS can be huge. So only do it for
the small number of users who
really need that experience.”
Dan
“If a customer wants to do VDI, they
usually assume it’s going to be a
dedicated virtual machine with
hypervisor layer and all the
storage and networking that was
used for server virtualization. In
reality, VDI is the right technology
only about 10% of the time. Most
use cases dictate other modalities
such as XenApp, App-V or
Provisioning Server, for example.
These can be achieved with lower
cost, excellent performance and
easier management.”
Steve
“For many users, session
virtualization is absolutely fine
– you don’t need an entire
OS as with VDI.”
Nick
“Structure your IT infrastructure so
that it serves your business, and
not the other way around.”
Robert
“The biggest insight I’ve gained
is to keep things simple and only
introduce complexity when there’s
a business case for it.”
Steve
Find your models with
Project Accelerator.
Our own project
management tool will help
you map your users to the
right deployment model.
Give it a try!

14. “Too often, customers
skip over the Assess
and Design stages –
and it comes back to
haunt them.”
Nick
Front load
your projects.
“There’s no short cut for a pretty
rigorous assessment stage
up front.”
Jarian
“Measure twice and cut once.
Mistakes are very expensive in
terms of dollars, manpower,
productivity and organizational
support. Design, test, re-design,
test and then rinse and repeat…”
Steve

15. “Certain common applications
belong in the image for technical
reasons, but the lion’s share of apps
should be virtualized to gain the real
benefits. When you do this you have
the ultimate flexibility to deliver the
applications any way you need to.”
Steve
Maintain your
layers of cake.
“Best practice is to
separate the OS from
the apps from the
personalization. If
you de-couple these
layers, administration
is easy and the system
is predictable.”
Nick
“You need to containerize your
apps early so you can layer them
properly. Yes, it costs a bit more
money up front but your ongoing
operational costs go way down.
A lot of companies just install
the apps inside the image and
utilize local profiles – then when
you update an app or tweak a user
setting, you have to crack open
the entire image to modify the OS,
which means downtime. With
layers, you can update a major
app like SAP without touching
the base OS layer.
Once apps start getting
installed inside images, the image
proliferation starts. And if each
image is 40-50 GBs, and you’re
keeping two or three copies for
backup/resiliency, that’s ~150 GB
of storage. For essentially one
image! This is why application
virtualization is key – to minimize
the number of images you need
to maintain and decrease
storage costs.”
Nick

16. Be realistic about
your hardware.
“You shouldn’t buy
anything until after
you’ve gathered
requirements and
finished your design.”
Steve
One of the biggest
errors I see is people
underestimating the
hardware they’re
going to need.
The only way to really do
hardwaresizingistounderstand
how users are working. You can
use Lakeside or other survey
tools to get a snapshot.
Jarian

17. Centralize your data.
“The Golden Rule
for VDI: Every
app must reside
in the same data
center as the data
it accesses.”
Dan

18. Centralize your data.Continued.
“It’s important to centralize your
data before you move to a virtual
environment –– or do it in parallel.
But do it.”
Jarian
“If you break this rule, you’re
pulling data over a WAN – and
your performance and user
experience will be terrible. An
SAP report that took 3-4 seconds
will now take 60-120 seconds
over a WAN – that’s unusable.”
Dan
“So don’t put the app in the
field where the user is – bring
the user to the centralized app
and its data.”
Dan
“You need all your data close to
your apps. It’s more secure.
Easier to back up and
performance is far better.”
Shane
“Centralize data for live
production, but whenever
possible keep it in more than one
place, on site and off site”
Steve
“You can’t separate desktop
centralization from data
centralization. If you want to
centralize an app or a desktop,
you must centralize its data at
the same time.”
Dan
It’s a good thing.
“Centralized data is easier to
manage, more secure and a lot
less expensive than trying to
maintain small data centers in
every branch office. It’s much
easier to maintain, backup, secure
and manage data from one or two
locations.”
Dan

19. “You need to get all the IT
administrators involved. Desktop
virtualization touches desktops,
applications, networks, security,
storage – and you need all the
admins of these things working
together. If one of the systems
goes wrong, the whole
environment suffers.”
Jarian
“Desktop virtualization touches
everything in IT. That’s good news
and bad news if you don’t get
everyone involved and the
communication going.”
Nick
“Desktop and application
virtualization involve all layers of
the stack, from hardware, storage,
network and operating system
all the way up through apps,
personalization and presentation.
This has to be a cross-discipline
effort and we always recommend
creating a project team that has
representation in all of these
areas”
Steve
“Project teams that try to do
this themselves with no input
from the other teams, especially
the business, always struggle.
It never works.”
Nick
Get the whole
IT team involved.
The desktop
team can’t do desktop
virtualization alone.
You need a cohesive
IT group.
Dan

20. By far the
biggest
deployment
trap is failing
to test.
Nick
“Use the application experts – the
users – to run tests. Don’t just let
an IT guy launch an app, click
around a bit and consider
testing complete.
Remove the user’s old endpoint
so they give their full attention
towards testing. Otherwise as
soon as the first problem arises,
they will switch back to their
old endpoint. The key here
is to make sure they can
perform all job functions in the
future environment before
removing the endpoint!”
Shane
“With the first test users and
business cases, we look for
people who are going to be
positive, and who will step up
and help. We make them the early
testers and rely on their feedback
to eliminate most issues before
going into general testing. When
they are satisfied and can show
success we make them the
poster child for the rest of the
organization. If you don’t
test, you will fail.”
Steve
“Load testing is critical.”
Jarian
“If you have branch offices,
have live users test from those
locations. It’s important to see
how the user experience will be
across your WAN links. If
possible, test with WAN
simulators first to tune policies,
then test with
live users.”
Shane
“I was called in to consult for a
pretty large public organization.
Just a few days before they went
live, they wanted to review the
structure. I asked if they had
done a test. They had not. They
were planning to run 40-50
people per server. I asked them:
What are you basing that on?
They had no idea. None. And they
didn’t even test it.”
Robert
“POCs are done on low-end
hardware, usually whatever is
laying around. You should look at
your new infrastructure design to
determine what the capacity will
really be in production. You’ve
got to stress things out to test
them. That’s critical! A lack of
proper scalability testing is one
of the biggest causes of failure
when companies move from
POC to production.”
Robert
“It’s not just user acceptance
testing (though it’s amazing that
some customers skip that too).
It’s performance and scalability
testing. I’d estimate that only
about ten percent of customers
do this properly or at all.
You need to find the bottlenecks
early – the things that cause
systems to break and lead to
outages – and design around
them. Only performance and
scalability testing can do that.”
Nick
“Don’t go from 5 users to 5,000
without proper performance
scalability testing. The idea is to
try to break the system
intentionally. Put 250 users on a
server or throw 2000 desktops in
a single resource pool or cluster.
That’s when you start to catch
the issues.”
Nick
Test,test,test.

21. Exploit the available
resources.
“Consider Citrix’s Provisioning
Server. This is the coolest thing
since sliced bread if you
understand how it works. Many
projects should use it but they
don’t because the technology
looks intimidating. But I could
teach you how to use it in a day or
two.”
Robert
“I created a rollout incidents app
in Podio for tracking tickets during
testing and trend the issues and
resolutions. If you don’t do
incident tracking during user
testing, you’ll repeat the mistakes
when you roll out.”
Shane
“There are incredible resources
available to you today – take
advantage of them. But do not lose
sight of the huge learning curve.
You must dedicate real time and
effort to get up to speed. The Citrix
FlexCast model is a perfect
example - you are given multiple
ways to solve the same problem,
so make sure you understand both
the problem and the differences in
the available solutions. “
Steve
“You need to educate yourself
and your team. Leverage Citrix
resources and take a systematic
approach to deployment, using
the planning guides, reference
architectures, Project Accelerator.
They’re out there – use them.” Shane
Go to Project Accelerator.
This is our go-to project
management tool for your
entire desktop virtualization
project.
project.citrix.com

22. “Project Accelerator is great
for sizing and reference
architectures. It’s really
important to review these.
The framework really helps
projects stay on track. Even
for experienced CTPs.”
Shane
“One of the first deliverables
in Project Accelerator is a
roadmap that shows you
which user groups to start
with and which delivery
model to use for each.”
Nick
“When you’re in the trenches, it’s hard
to stay on top of developments with
the technology. Project Accelerator
has the latest best practice and the
latest documentation built in so you
stay up to date.
With Project Accelerator, our
customers see the project moving
forward – it gives everyone on the
project constant visibility.”
Shane
“I like Project Accelerator. It takes a lot
of important data into account and
asks the right questions. It takes
extensive expertise to determine what
the general outline of any given project
will be in terms of hardware, software,
services, planning and execution.
This tool helps you get a good picture
of what your project will look like
without requiring the level of skill that
the experts in this eBook have.”
Steve
A word
about Project
Accelerator.
Forgive the shameless plug, but we’re proud of this
puppy (and our experts seem to like it too).
We basically tried
to capture all the best
practice advice from
our consultants and
wrap it up in a self-
service environment.
Dan
Try it now!
project.citrix.com

23. Conclusion
To be honest, we weren’t
sure what kind of things we’d
come up with when we set
out to make this eBook.
Would it be too detailed and
technical? Would it be too
obvious and generic?
What we got back from our
generous contributors feels
to us like solid gold: real,
front-line advice from the
mouths of some of the
world’s most experienced
desktop virtualization
experts.
The themes that we
summarize here all emerged
naturally, from the experts
themselves. In most cases,
the advice was unanimous.
Which left us with a strong
impression that we’re
starting to hit the real, critical
issues that drive the most
successful desktop
virtualization deployments.
We hope you enjoyed reading
it as much as we enjoyed
assembling it.
And, more importantly, we
hope it helps you make your
own desktop virtualization
projects run smoothly.
The Citrix Consulting and
Project Accelerator teams
Oh, and if you did enjoy this
eBook… please do share this
with your colleagues:

24. More Resources
Our XenDesktop Blog
For best-practice advice
from some of our top people
The XenDesktop
Support Forum
There’s not a lot this
community doesn’t know
about desktop virtualization
The XenDesktop
Design Handbook
With reference architectures,
planning guides and lots
more
The Citrix Knowledge Center
Dig in - we share everything
we know
eDocumentation
All our documentation in an
easy-to-use format
The Ask the Architect blog
An excellent team blog by
some of the best in the
business
Podio
The social collaboration
platform that you make
your own.
AppDNA
The application compatibility
testing tool that accelerates
and de-risks migration.

25. About Citrix Services
We’re Citrix consultants,
teachers and support
engineers and we’re all about
one thing: making sure
you succeed.
With our help, you’ll deploy
high-performance, robust
virtualization and networking
projects, faster and with
dramatically lower risk
and higher return.
From free online tools and
24x7 support to intensive
training, live events and
deeply committed consulting
engagements – we’re here
for you.
How we can help
Citrix Consulting
Intensive engagements for
complex, critical or just plain
massive projects.
Citrix Support
Always-on support services
that leverage everything we
know about best-practice
deployment and
maintenance.
Citrix Education
The fastest, most efficient
way to get your team the
virtualization skills they
need. Online, on-site
or in class.
Plus free tools resources,
including:
The Knowledge Center
Online forums,
documentation and
support resources
Citrix Auto Support
The automated online
troubleshooter and
health-checker.
Project Accelerator
The project management
environment for your
entire desktop
virtualization project.