What Is Good End User Experience?

When we discuss desktop management and delivery using virtualization, the various vendors in the space like to bring up end user experience as a selling point.  Matt Hensley discussed this in his blog and gave some great direction on some of the tools out there that have focused on monitoring and placing a metric around end user experience when VDI is in use:

http://matthensley.wordpress.com/2009/06/08/vdi-monitoring-and-the-end-user-experience/ 

I want to continue to build on that conversation and add in some of the approach details we have seen to be successful as we have started to tackle the desktop.

The first thing we have to make sure is clear: VDI is a subset of an overall desktop management/delivery strategy.  Since the desktop has multiple layers, our approach should not focus just on putting a desktop on a server.  We need to look at how we can break the desktop into manageable layers, then deliver those layers in a method that the use case calls for.  With that in mind, we need to approach the end user experience the same way.  Each use case will call for a different type of experience based on the way the end user needs to work, the applications they use, their environment and location.  Once we determine these items, this will feed into the overall design and deployment path we need to take.

Why do we go through this trouble?  If money is no object and you have limitless network, storage and compute, you could probably get away with just picking the heaviest use case and using it to design the infrastructure for everything.  But we know that isn't possible.  Much of the debate has been around the financial viability of leveraging desktop virtualization.  But many times that is because we just focus on VDI and not the approach of how to delivery a more efficient desktop, and all of it's layers. 

In the past, we haven't had the ability to measure the inner workings of the desktop environment enough to figure out what the users need to get the experience they need. There are many desktop management tools that can give us numbers, but they were not created with virtualization in mind.  Those times are changing, Matt discusses tools that we can use to look into the environment and monitor key metrics to put a score around end user experience so we can design, deploy, optimize and grow the environment.  Some of those tools like Liquidware Stratusphere help us to assess before we even start.  We can group our users, assign the kind of experience they need and design the environment to meet those needs.  We can't promise it will be an easy process, but it normally is a process that can give us the best results.