VDI Design Guide

Coming soon: The VDI Design Guide

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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…

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NVIDIA SMI P4 End User Computing
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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….

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Monitoring
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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…

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VCDX
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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…

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VDI Design Guide
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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,…

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assessment
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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…

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vEUCTechCon
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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…

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VMworld
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Review of VMworld 2017 in Barcelona

This week, Barcelona was the virtualization-capital of the world because of the annual VMworld conference that took place at the Fira Gran Via. Although it was very close to the Vegas conference (which had all of the announcements), this edition of VMworld Europe was still a great one with many highlights. My own session The absolute highlight of this VMworld to me was of course my own breakout session. As this was my  first performance at the number one stage in the world, I must admit that I was quite nervous. Especially since I added a lot of live demo’s…

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