20 01732 759725 on physical desktops, where it chews all the resource and they have to sit while it thinks about it. With Controlup DEX we’ve been able to manage those as well.” Moyes says that ControlUp has been particularly useful in identifying issues experienced by remote workers, which he says are the single biggest source of alerts, both through automatic alerts and realtime monitoring of a user’s environment. “The advantage of ControlUp is that if there is a problem with a remote worker, it’s much easier to figure out what’s going on and why, whether that’s an issue with their local bandwidth or an issue with the ISP or an issue with the home router. ControlUp gives us a lot more insight and quite detailed statistics about what’s going on within a user’s local machine, whether that’s Windows, Mac or Chromebook. It’s helped us explain ‘why’ to an individual. Before it could get quite confrontational, with someone working in Spain, for example, saying this Citrix or this VDI is rubbish, it doesn’t work. When you break it down and you see they’ve got a router that they’ve had for 10 years and not replaced, it’s a really rapid way of giving the user an explanation of why it’s not working, so we can proactively put a plan together on how we change things so that it does work.” Third party access Moyes adds that he also uses ControlUp to provide a better experience for third parties. “We’ve asked individual third parties to put ControlUp DEX agents on their machine, purely so that if there are any issues we can see them. We normally do that as a proof of concept to make sure there’s not too much latency, that it’s a good experience for them because, selfishly, if you’re engaging with a third party you want them to have the best experience possible as well, because then they’ll want to work with you again and are likely to do a better job. If there’s an issue to complain about or there’s an issue to pin it on, then it’s probably going to be IT. It’s about trying to remove boundaries and blockers to collaboration with others.” Above all, it gives Moyes reassurance. “When things go drastically wrong, it’s not normally something within the VDI environment or within ControlUp. It’s a power cut or one of the switches has gone. Getting those notifications real time makes a difference and it’s a comfort actually seeing them come through, because you’ve got an appreciation for how stable the environment actually is.” www.controlup.com outsourced drafting house in Vietnam or wherever it might be.” No guarantees Benefits such as these mean that VDI environments are becoming increasingly common in architect practices, especially larger, top 50 practices. However, not all get the return they hoped for which is something Moyes was acutely aware of when embarking on this transformation. “My greatest fear was that it would go terribly wrong and we’d end up spending an awful lot of money on a lot of very heavy paperweights. Some of our peers have put VDI solutions in place and they’ve not been as successful as they had hoped. I had a real fear that an end user would log in, end up on a VDI session, and it wouldn’t perform as well as if they had logged in on a physical desktop. If it wasn’t better than the experience of coming in over Citrix onto a physical desktop, this solution would have failed. So, when we did the implementation, we did quite a bit of work around things like the profile size and how much GPU to give each client. We started off with the application recommendations and have tweaked it up and up, not so much for the applications they are using today, but to future-proof the environment and to stop us overstretching it, in terms of the number of users.” He adds: “I couldn’t afford for it to fail, so we had to make sure that, for the investment we were making, we were prepared to put in the resource and the time to make sure that it delivered as good an experience as a physical desktop.” Extra support Two key benefits in this context were SimpsonHaugh’s partnership with ebb3 and its implementation of ControlUp’s Digital Employee Experience (DEX) platform for real-time performance monitoring and optimisation. “We’ve only got a very small IT team and it’s an overhead to the business. It’s not our core business, so it’s very difficult to justify an additional IT head or to say, because we’re bringing in VDI, we’re going to need an extra head costing £80,000 a year to help manage and maintain that. Using ebb3 to provide a managed service fills that void and overcomes the need to carry specialist second and third line knowledge around the implementation. Also, VDI’s great once it’s in and it’s working, but actually getting it in and working takes a lot of knowledge, skill, perseverance and understanding of the overall infrastructure. Some people fail because they buy the solution, put it in and think it’s a magic bullet that’s just going to work without actually engaging with specialist third parties to make sure they get the maximum return from the investment.” Moyes adds that ControlUp too requires a bit of work initially to get set up, configured and working, after which it just ticks away in the background and does its thing invisibly both to the IT team and to users on both virtual and physical desktops, monitoring the IT environment and proactively sending alerts to the IT team and ebb3 when it identifies a problem that could impact the user experience. “It’s minimal touch, and it’s one of those tools that, when there is a problem, gives you so much data about what the issue is that it becomes much simpler and quicker to resolve than before, when a lot of intuition and guesswork would have been involved. “When we put the VDI environment in, we had quite a number of niggly issues around the performance of certain applications we use that were just chewing all the resource. From an end user perspective, either Citrix had crashed or the VDI computer had crashed; there wasn’t a real understanding about the fact that sometimes the application was just thinking. ebb3 recommended ControlUp to get analytics on what was going on so that it could then use ControlUp to do things like application throttling to ensure that for the end user, even if one of the applications is trying to eat all the resource, they’ve still got enough resource to open email or use a different application. It felt like a much better experience for them. We’ve still got people ...continued END USER COMPUTING ©Hufton+Crow One Blackfriars
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