vHojan.nl - Bearded VDI Junkie

Writing the VDI Design Guide: Why, What and How?

August 14, 2018August 14, 2018

If you haven’t noticed it, check this post. Since early August, the VDI Design Guide is available in the Amazon bookstore. Writing a book isn’t something you should take lightly, that’s what I experienced myself in the last 12 months. But why? And what challenges did I face? Would I do it all over again? And what would I do differently? I would like to answer these and more questions in this blog post. Let’s start with a theme from the book: Why? Why would you spend most of your free time writing a book instead of just writing some…

August 6, 2018August 8, 2018

Finally, the waiting is over: the VDI Design Guide is available!

Twelve months of spending most evenings and weekends in my man cave have come to an end. Since today, the VDI Design Guide is available at the Amazon bookstore! About a year ago, I started my journey to make one of my dreams for the past couple of years come true: become an author. While being at the VMworld conference 2017 in Las Vegas, the first foundation was made. The idea of writing a design guide for Horizon-based VDI solutions came from my personal VCDX journey. In the time that I spent designing, applying, preparing and defending my project, I…

June 26, 2018June 26, 2018

Coming soon: The VDI Design Guide

The past year has been a very interesting one. Those of you who followed me on my blog, on twitter or in real-life may have noticed that I’ve been busy with a project called The VDI Design Guide. In the past couple of years, I have collected a lot of information about designing VDI solution. These bits and pieces together formed the basis of what is an almost-finished book. When I started this project, I had a clear image of what the result should look like: a structured guide that is able to run you through all possible steps from building…

March 30, 2018March 30, 2018

How to avoid an NVIDIA Tesla P4 to overheat

The biggest part of authoring the VDI Design Guide is research. Research on all kinds of things. Sizing, infrastructure, validation of best practices and last but not least: performance. One of my goals is to give some insights into (as I call it) The Art of the Possible. Pushing the limits of a virtual desktop is part of that and that’s why I decided to see if an NVIDIA Tesla P4 and a Xeon E5-2620 V2 are capable of running the 2016 version of Doom. To give you a heads-up, it works. But I took some hurdles to get it smoothly to work….

March 6, 2018March 6, 2018

Goliath Technologies expands VMware Horizon support

Goliath Technologies has been a strong player in the Citrix ecosystem for quite a while now with multiple products such as their Performance Monitor, Application Monitor and Netscaler Monitor. The solutions already had support for VMware vSphere to monitor virtual machines and the physical infrastructure, and since the newest version, the Goliath Performance Monitor also supports VMware Horizon. In this post I would like to highlight some of the features which I think can have a great benefit in VMware-based VDI solutions. Logon Monitor Let me first tell some more about one of the use cases of the Goliath Performance Monitor; the…

January 5, 2018

VDI Design Essentials: How to define requirements?

Quite recently, I have reviewed some designs that contained some wrongly defined requirements. A wrongly defined requirement can have a huge impact on the design, that’s why I thought it would be a good idea to put together a post with some background information about this topic. Requirement vs Constraint According to Wikipedia, a requirement is described as follows: A condition or capability needed by a stakeholder to solve a problem or achieve an objective. It is not to be mixed up by a constraint, which is described as: A restriction or limitation on the degree of freedom you have…

October 9, 2017October 9, 2017

New project: VDI Design Guide

As you may have read on twitter a couple of weeks ago, I started a new project. One of my ambitions in the past 3 years, is to become an author. But due to a lot of reasons, I didn’t start. In the last 3 months I attended a personal leadership training and that’s where I came to the conclusion that there wasn’t anything holding me back in starting. Today, I started my new project in life. Become an author. On #VMware #EUC stuff that is.. #Thrilled #Excited — Johan van Amersfoort (@vhojan) September 20, 2017 To become an author,…

October 4, 2017March 5, 2018

Commodity IT, the problem formerly known as Shadow IT

I have been working on a couple of projects the last 6 months where we designed and deployed digital workspaces. All of these customers had different drivers behind those projects such as: Staying ahead of the competition Create a millenial-proof workspace environment Reduce administrative overhead on desktop management Consolidate our localized workspace management (point) solutions to a global hosted cloud Transform our workspace service from a CapEx model to an OpEx model Most of these drivers are valid drivers to migrate towards a digital workspace and will almost certainly fit in such a stratgey. Something that none of the customers…

October 2, 2017March 5, 2018

VMware End-User Computing TechCon (vEUCTechCon)

The past 9 months I visited a lot of VMUG’s, UserCons and both VMworlds and in most cases to present. One of the things that I noticed is that particularly at VMworlds, End-User Computing is getting a bigger stage. Workspace ONE is pretty hot and most likely the biggest reason for this. At VMUG’s and UserCon’s at the other hand, it is still a black sheep. The main reason is of course that VMware was a manufacturer of infrastructure-management software (of which the hypervisor was the biggest part) and user groups that were created around these products were also focussed on…