What fits your environment - VDI or RDSH/App Publishing (Part 1)

One of the most important and first step in any End User Computing based project is Plan and Design. And the most important step off Plan and Design is User Profiling.

I have seen numerous projects failing in absence of appropriate planning and profiling of Users.

By User Profiling I mean to look into below classifications

• Which user categories are considered as a part of EUC Project ?
• What is their working nature, e.g. field sales, front desk, developers etc.?
• What applications do they use?
• What Operating System does the end user use for day to day work?
• Do they use any specific external devices with their desktops?
• Do they need admin rights to install and applications?

And so on…

The more you know and understand end user environment, the better will be plan and design outcome.

These factors also decide the which technology would be appropriate - A true VDI or a Shared Desktop.

To illustrate with an example: -

·    If I have a developer who needs to run scripts, test different application and do a lot of custom work, I will choose to give him Full Clone Desktop or Linked Clone Desktop with a Writable Volume attached.

·    However, if my user is a field sales guy and only access his desktop occasionally to update his CRM application, RDSH or App Publishing is most appropriate.

Once you have decided on the technology the next step of Planning is Sizing for the environment.

You can read my below posts on details around sizing

• Sizing for a VDI environment
• Sizing for a Hosted Desktop or Application Publishing environment