What is the end user experience of your VDI platform? Losing sight of the end user experience is a fundamental mistake in VDI. Yet it is surprising how few products monitor the user experience of accessing a desktop through VDI. Today I spent an hour learning about Login PI, from Login VSI. You may be familiar with Login VSI from the product that bears this name and from vendor VDI benchmarks. Login VSI measures the responsiveness of a VDI platform with a controlled desktop count and a consistent real-world workload inside each desktop. They drive real applications inside the VDI desktop and measure the response time of those applications. For benchmarking, Login VSI drives a large number of desktops with a consistent workload. It helps to identify the maximum number of desktops that can be supported at an acceptable response time. This is great to identify the capacity of a platform or the impact of a change, before it is committed to thousands of live users.
What I saw today was Login Pi, which is a monitoring product rather than a benchmarking product. It launches a connection to a single desktop, inside a production desktop pool alongside production users. The single desktop runs through a sequence of application functions and reports the response times. These test desktop connections can be launched from multiple remote sites. Usually from each site where your users reside and to multiple desktop pools. Each session reports back the connection success, network bandwidth, and application response times. The reports go to a central monitoring console where a rolled-up view of the user experience is shown. Right now, the dashboard is fairly simple, it will tell you overall health and let you identify problem clusters, sites or datacenters. I really like the simple and clean dashboard, not overloaded with data. Login Pi will help VDI administrators identify the scope and location of VDI user performance issues. When a user or group of users complain of slow performance, Login PI will help identify whether it is a network issue or a datacenter issue. There are displays to help identify whether it is the WAN to one site or the network inside one data center. The application response time information will highlight data center issues distinctly from network issues. This is not something that end users understand when they report a slow desktop. You may realize that I really like Login Pi. I loved concept when the product was launched a little over a year ago and I like what they are doing to develop it further.
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