businessinfomag.uk magazine 22 END USER COMPUTING 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 costing £80,000 a year to help manage and maintain the VDI. Getting ebb3 to provide a managed service fills that void and overcomes the need to carry specialist knowledge around the implementation. Also, VDI is great once it’s in and working, but getting to that point 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, rather than 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 to get set up, configured and working, after which it just ticks away in the background, 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 across SimpsonHaugh’s virtual and physical desktops. “It’s minimal touch and, when there is a problem, it gives you so much data about what the issue is that it becomes much simpler and quicker to resolve compared to before when a lot of intuition and guesswork was involved. “When we put in the VDI environment, we had quite a number of niggly issues around the performance of certain applications that were just chewing all the resource. As far as the end user was concerned, either Citrix had crashed or the VDI computer had crashed; there wasn’t much understanding that sometimes the application was just thinking. ebb3 recommended ControlUp to get analytics on what was going on and to do things like application throttling so that even if one of the applications is trying to eat all the resource the end user still has enough to open email or use a different application.” 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 real-time 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 quite detailed statistics about what’s going on within a user’s local machine, whether that’s Windows, Mac or Chromebook, which helps 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 see they’ve had the same router for 10 years, it becomes easy to explain what the problem is and then proactively put a plan together to change things.” 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 and that it’s a good experience for them. If you’re engaging a third party you want them to have the best experience possible, 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. Seeing them come through is a comfort because it gives you an appreciation of how stable the environment actually is.” www.controlup.com ©Hufton+Crow One Blackfriars continued...
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