Managing Application
Delivery for Virtual Desktops
An ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) White Paper
Prepared for Anunta Technologies Inc
October 2015
IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Managing Application Delivery for Virtual Desktops
Table of Contents
Executive Summary........................................................................................................................... 1
Evolving Application Requirements for Desktop Virtualization........................................................ 1
Establishing User-Focused Desktop Virtualization Deployments...................................................... 3
Enable Holistic Visibility Across the Entire Application Delivery Chain...................................... 3
Filter Out Irrelevant Data and Target Only User-Impacting Conditions..................................... 3
Maximize the Productivity of IT Investments.............................................................................. 4
Effective and Efficient Application Delivery with EuVantage™.......................................................... 5
EMA Perspective................................................................................................................................ 6
About Anunta ................................................................................................................................... 7
©2015 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com
Managing Application Delivery for Virtual Desktops
Executive Summary
As adoption of desktop virtualization accelerates, organizations are increasingly challenged to
continuously deliver applications reliably with high performance and availability. To prevent impacts
to end user productivity, organizations should enable holistic visibility, employ adaptive analytics, and
make informed decisions that will maximize the performance of their application delivery support stack.
Pragmatic approaches to application delivery involve the introduction of centralized, holistic visibility
that directly maps end user productivity to the underlying infrastructure hosting the environment.
Evolving Application Requirements for Desktop
Virtualization
While desktop virtualization technologies have been in active use for decades, increasing requirements
for improving IT availability, enhancing security, and reducing overall IT management costs have
greatly accelerated desktop virtualization adoption in recent years. In fact, according to EMA
primary research, the number of adopters of desktop virtualization solutions – including virtual
desktop infrastructures (VDI), remote desktop services (RDS), client-hosted desktop virtualization,
and application virtualization platforms – have doubled in just the past two years (from 2013 to
2015). Further, the same research also concluded desktop virtualization adopters were overwhelmingly
satisfied with their deployed solutions, with 95% of surveyed organizations reporting they had achieved
measurable cost savings from the introduction of desktop virtualization solutions.
IT administration support costs
56%
Software/license costs
50%
Hardware costs
49%
Energy costs
42%
Client device costs (e.g., PC replacement with thin client)
No cost saving achieved
24%
5%
Figure 1: Percent of survey respondents indicating areas where the adoption
of desktop virtualization resulted in measurable cost savings
Despite the quantifiable value and enthusiasm for desktop virtualization, organizations continue to be
challenged to reliably deliver end user applications in those environments. On average, organizations
report it takes more than five hours to deploy a new virtual desktop and nearly eight hours to deploy
a single application to a virtual desktop. These slow provision times are symptomatic of organizations
that rely on traditional management approaches which focus on IT enablement rather than enhancing
end user experiences. Similarly, organizations using traditional methods that isolate application
management from the management of the underlying infrastructure report much higher rates of end
user-reported problems than those of nonvirtualized environments.
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Managing Application Delivery for Virtual Desktops
According to EMA’s survey-based research, 66% of organizations that have adopted desktop virtualization
solutions do not believe they have sufficient visibility of their environment to resolve recurring problems.
In particular, organizations lack the ability to map application performance in a desktop virtualization
environment back to the underlying hardware and software infrastructure on which it is being hosted.
This inhibits the ability to perform true root cause analysis as manual processes for event correlation in
complex deployments are supremely ineffective. These are out of control environments that reactively
respond to systemic failure events, rather than proactively optimizing the environment to enhance end
user productivity. To achieve maximum value out of a desktop virtualization investment, organizations
must enable holistic visibility across the entire application ecosystem to identify optimal configurations
and cost-efficiencies.
36%
Data/storage management
Application performance management
28%
Capacity management
28%
Right-sizing of application environment and virtual
machines
26%
25%
Compliance attainment
23%
Proactively identifying potential system failures
22%
Optimizing application/workload placement
19%
Performing root cause analysis
Mapping application dependencies to virtual and physical
components
16%
Getting unified visibility across infrastructure and apps in a
single console
15%
Meeting SLA commitments
15%
Figure 2: Percent of survey respondents indicating the most difficult management processes
for supporting, provisioning, and maintaining a desktop virtualization environment
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Managing Application Delivery for Virtual Desktops
Establishing User-Focused Desktop Virtualization
Deployments
Business success is principally dependent on the productivity of its workforce. The purpose of IT is to
empower that workforce with resources that will accelerate employee productivity to drive improved
business agility and profitability. Recognizing this, organizations are increasingly adopting solutions
that focus on user experience management (UEM), ensuring IT infrastructures are architected to
support end user requirements rather than the other way around. For many organizations, desktop
virtualization delivers many of the requirements for UEM, such as
ease of access, a common environment across multiple devices, and
Despite the quantifiable value
centralized management for non-disruptive maintenance practices.
However, the adoption of desktop virtualization alone is only the
and enthusiasm for desktop
beginning of UEM enablement. Desktop virtualization solutions
virtualization, organizations
act as an intermediary between applications and the underlying
continue to be challenged to
infrastructure (e.g., hosting servers, storage, networks, etc.), but
reliably deliver user applications
it does little to nothing to monitor and maintain performance on
in those environments.
either. Listed below are three essential processes for enabling true
UEM in a desktop virtualization environment.
1. Enable Holistic Visibility Across the Entire Application Delivery Chain
Any application delivery service is, in fact, an ecosystem comprised of multiple independent systems
and services interacting in a variety of complex ways to orchestrate simplified end user access to
business software. Performance issues with any individual components – such as server processing,
network connectivity, storage IOPS, and software subsystems – can degrade application functionality
and responsiveness. This is particularly a concern with desktop virtualization deployments because
of the additional management layers and dynamic resource allocations imposed by the virtualization
platforms. While most IT operations teams can tell you if their end users are experiencing performance
problems (they will certainly be hearing all the complaints), they are rarely able to identify the
specific hosting devices that are actually responsible for the poorly performing applications. Only by
continuously monitoring each of these hardware and software components and understanding how
they relate to each other can informed decisions be made on how to optimize, repair, and maintain the
complete environment.
2. Filter Out Irrelevant Data and Target Only User-Impacting Conditions
While continuous and detailed monitoring of the desktop virtualization ecosystem will provide a
comprehensive collection of data points on application support stack, the sheer amount of collected
information will be far too sizeable to be meticulously reviewed by administrators. The majority of
information will be mundane device status messages that will likely be ignored as “white noise” to
administrators, causing them to miss critical failure or performance degradation events when they
actually do occur. Adaptive analytics solves this problem by automatically filtering recorded data to
identify events and conditions that require administrator attention. Additionally, adaptive analytics
can correlate status information to identify the root cause of failures. This is particularly advantageous
for desktop virtualization environments as it allows application performance problems to be correlated
directly to the underlying infrastructure element causing it.
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Managing Application Delivery for Virtual Desktops
Through proactive reporting of failure conditions, adaptive analytics substantially reduces the meantime-to-discovery (MTTD) and the mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) of application performance
problems. In fact, EMA primary research indicates organizations that adopt adaptive analytics
to monitor storage environments experience half as many environment problems as those without
solutions, and those that adopted the technology to support network environments experience only
one-fifth the number of failure incidents. In addition to improved service availability and performance,
adaptive analytics is critical to ensuring organizations meet requirements for service level agreements
(SLAs) and regulatory compliance.
41%
Proactive alerts
32%
Enables automated problem resolution
29%
Correlate performance, capacity and compliance issues
26%
Simplification of root cause analysis
Inclusion of more relevant data into the decision process
24%
Ability to parse log data for faster root cause analysis
24%
Dynamic alert thresholds
24%
Elimination of false positives
Centralized control across silos
Identifying specific issue remediation steps
22%
20%
18%
Figure 3: Percent of survey respondents indicating the most valuable features of an IT operations analytics tool
3. Maximize the Productivity of IT Investments
Working together, comprehensive monitoring and analytics provide the essential environment
intelligence to make informed decisions on the most effective and efficient deployment of IT resources.
Existing IT hardware infrastructure and software components should leverage this data to ensure
optimal configurations that maximize their performance and utilization. Similarly, new hardware and
software resources can be appropriately sized based on this information to provide the most value to the
business. Simply put, underprovisioned resources fail to provide sufficient support to enable end user
productivity while overprovisioned devices waste valuable funding. Through monitoring and analytics,
the right balance can be struck to ensure both performance and cost-effectiveness in IT investments.
In addition, leveraging the intelligence from monitoring and analytics improves administrator agility
and effectiveness. When administrators spend less time “firefighting” failure events, they have more time
available to proactively improve the service environment and introduce new end user-focused solutions.
It is also critical to note that holistic visibility provides a common set of data – a single voice of truth, if
you will – across application delivery infrastructure. This can be employed by administrators in different,
independent support organizations to enable effective cross-departmental management practices.
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Managing Application Delivery for Virtual Desktops
Effective and Efficient Application
Delivery with EuVantage™
As a key enabler of UEM,
EuVantage™ is focused
on improving application
performance and availability
from every element in the
delivery chain – all the
way down to the physical
hosting infrastructure – to
ensure end users have
continuous, on-demand
access to critical business
applications and services.
Recognizing the value that can be achieved from cross domain visibility
and event correlation between application usage and the underlying
infrastructure, Anunta Technologies has introduced EuVantage™,
a service assurance platform purpose-built to bring visibility to the
entire application chain in desktop virtualization environments. As a
key enabler of UEM, EuVantage™ is focused on improving application
performance and availability from every element in the delivery chain
– all the way down to the physical hosting infrastructure – to ensure
end users have continuous, on-demand access to critical business
applications and services. The solution achieves this level of reliability
through the integration of several key management processes. First,
all application delivery components are automatically discovered and
any dependency relationships are recorded. The entire application
delivery environment is then continuously monitored for performance and health status. Synthetic
monitoring is employed to record end user experiences and detect any performance issues with end
user transactions. Adaptive analytics is applied to all this data to identify any issues requiring automated
remediation or administrator attention.
Figure 4: The EuVantage™ Topology Map
The comprehensive data collected by EuVantage™ facilitates informed decision-making for optimal
performance across the support stack. Real-time maps and pre-built dashboard charts continuously display
easily digestible performance metrics for all elements in the application chain. This information provides
critical intelligence that can be used to correlate environment performance through all management layers,
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Managing Application Delivery for Virtual Desktops
down to the physical hardware (e.g., systems and networking). This detailed environment visibility is also
essential for enabling effective event triggers that can alert IT operation or directly initiate automated
remediation processes. It is also important to note that EuVantage™ is delivering cross-domain visibility,
enabling true root cause analysis and cross-departmental cooperation that eliminates the challenges
inherent when siloed organizations employ independent monitoring tools.
As a cloud-hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, EuVantage™ requires minimal software or
hardware purchases to deploy, and it may be adopted, expanded or discontinued simply through the
web interface. The solution is accessed and managed from a centralized web console that is easy to
understand and use. Specifically designed to optimize application delivery in desktop virtualization
environments, EuVantage™ offers comprehensive visibility across related support stacks that will
accelerate end user productivity and business success.
EMA Perspective
EMA defines value in any management solution as the intersection of breadth of functionality with the
solution’s total cost of ownership. A value solution, therefore, is one that meets business requirements
but does not exceed budgetary restrictions by including a complex architecture and/or unnecessary
features. This philosophy has particular relevance when considering options for improving application
delivery. For instance, an application performance management (APM) solution may successfully record
details about an application state and performance, but typically these tools fail to provide the essential
correlation and mapping necessary for identifying related infrastructure components. In fact, most
APM solutions are designed to support developer environments and are not really suited for enhancing
IT operations. Conversely, systems management tools offer solutions for maintaining infrastructure
components, (e.g., servers, storage, and networking devices), but they lack any understanding
of application utilization. Recently, attempts have been made to integrate APM with systems and
infrastructure management tools by adopting software-defined data center (SDDC) solutions and
processes, but these have proven to be extremely complex and costly to implement – a fact that makes
SDDCs accessible only to the largest of enterprises. A more pragmatic approach to holistic application
performance assurance ensures any adopted solution is right-sized to meet organizational requirements.
Midsized organizations are especially advantaged by a pragmatic solution that balances both broad
functionality and cost-effectiveness. That particular demographic is commonly challenged with
limited budgets and small support teams that must “wear many hats” to increase IT productivity
with fewer resources. Holistic visibility across the application delivery stack empowers administrators
to monitor and manage multiple support elements from a single console. Additionally, analytical
problem identification and root cause intelligence significantly reduces the MTTD and MTTR of
performance issues, freeing up administrators to make process improvements and deliver other end
user-focused services.
EuVantage™ successfully achieves the key requirements for delivering holistic visibility across enterprise
application ecosystems, all the way down to the underlying hardware infrastructure. The solution
exposes relationships between individual software elements, enabling informed decisions to be made
on optimal configurations and environment enhancements. EMA recommends EuVantage™ to any
organization seeking to optimize application performance, simplify management, and maximize the
cost-effectiveness of desktop virtualization environments.
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Managing Application Delivery for Virtual Desktops
About Anunta
Anunta® (www.anuntatech.com) is a leading provider of End User Computing solutions that help
enterprises address today’s application delivery challenges by migrating from traditional client-server
architecture to a unified desktop and application services environment. Anunta’s ADaaS® suite of
solutions uses a variety of virtualization technologies and guarantees superior business application
performance and lower IT management costs. Anunta’s SaaS-based, smart monitoring product,
EuVantage™ (www.euvantage.com) helps simplify the management and delivery of applications to
virtual desktops. EuVantage’s adaptive analytics and user centric topology maps ensure a 70% reduction
in Mean-Time-To-Resolution. Anunta is a Red Herring Top 100 Asia company and is ISO 20000
certified for ITSM and ISO 27001 for ISMS.
About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that provides deep insight across the full spectrum
of IT and data management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices,
and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help EMA’s clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research,
analysis, and consulting services for enterprise line of business users, IT professionals and IT vendors at www.enterprisemanagement.com or
blogs.enterprisemanagement.com. You can also follow EMA on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.
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