In stores now: The VDI Design Guide Part II

The moment you all have been waiting for has finally come. After 10 months of regularly hiding in my man-cave, listening to EDM, and feeding my caffeine addiction, I can proudly announce that the result is finally available for everyone to enjoy. The original VDI Design Guide has a sequel. It’s not a revision of the first book, it’s a new book (which does lean on the first book). What can you expect from the new book? Let me explain!

I concluded the first book with the following question to the reader: As I am always interested in The Art of the Possible, I would love to hear what kind of other challenges you have faced when designing your VDI. You as a reader took this very seriously and the result was that over the past three years I have seen a lot of different use cases which ran perfectly fine on a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Some of them were so interesting that I decided that they deserved to be shared with the rest of the world.

Use cases

Use cases make or break a VDI. Without proper use cases, and the design aspect of those use cases, a VDI can be relatively useless for an organization. Using the design methodology from the first book, I have designed, validated, tested, and productized all of the use cases you can find in the book, such as:

  • Media editing
  • Virtual Reality
  • Healthcare
  • VDI by Day, Compute by Night
  • The VMware EUC Home lab

Outcome-based delivery

What’s really important with use cases, is that they drive a certain outcome of a project. Where the first book described an entire section to business cases, this book takes that even further and focuses on the soft side of end-user computing (EUC) with themes like the outcome-based approach, people and processes, and the impact of the global pandemic on EUC, both from an IT perspective and employee perspective.

Once upon a time..

Instead of writing a pure factual IT book (which I never seem to finish reading, but instead, use to look up certain things), I wanted to share much more. IT facts, history, experiences, anecdotes, and experiences from others. This means that pure factual writing can be hard. Like the first book, I decided to use a storytelling methodology. My friend Brian Madden once taught me a valuable lesson:

“Make the podcasts you would like to listen to, create the videos you would like to watch, and write the book you want to read”.

This is exactly what I did. I read my new book 2 times front to back, and I love it!

Contributions

One of the things I got a lot of positive feedback about, was the interview section of the first book. Because of that feedback, I decided to add interviews to the new book again, but take them to the next level. The new book contains interviews with industry legends like Christian Reilly, William Lam, Frank Denneman, Spencer Pitts, and Matt Coppinger. Next to those interviews, my colleague Age Roskam contributed on the security side of things, and Brian Madden wrote the foreword!

Many thanks

Writing such a book sometimes can be very challenging, especially when needing to validate certain stuff. I have a pretty nice lab, but for some things that really wasn’t sufficient. I need to thank the people at NVIDIA (especially Chris Kerker and Jits Langedijk), Intel (especially Tom Schoemaker), and ITQ (especially Francisco Perez van der Oord and Bertwin Oudenampsen) to support my research and fully enable me to get my facts straight.

Get your copy now!

The VDI Design Guide Part II can be ordered here. It’s currently just a paperback, but there are plans to release an e-book as well (which may take a while). Get your copy today and enjoy reading!!

Listen to EUC Digest to hear more about the book and the writing process while you are waiting for the book to be delivered 🙂

Johan van Amersfoort
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Johan van Amersfoort

Johan van Amersfoort is a VCDX-DTM, VMware EUC Champion, vExpert, and NVIDIA NGCA member, working as a Technical Marketing Architect and EUC Geek at ITQ Consultancy. He is the author of the VDI Design Guide. More about Johan can be found on the about page.