So whats the difference?

Although not apparent by simply looking at a desktop there are many differences behind the scene that make the difference between moving to a Hosted Desktop service and forgetting about PC issue and moving to a Hosted Desktop service and having the same issues you had before but with the added complexity of remote access to manage. If migrated and managed correctly the Hosted desktop provides a simple and practice solution to outsource the entire IT head ache and allow you and your staff to get on with their jobs.

Location

The location the equipment is hosted in should be a factor in making your decision. One extreme is having your servers hosted in a foreign country. The distance between your office and the data centre is vast and the latency between your office and the server you are working on will be reduced.

Over a VPN type connection where a user downloads a file to work on, bandwidth is the main consideration because this allows you to download the file quickly. With a hosted desktop bandwidth isn’t a big issue because only small amounts of data pass between the service (key strokes and mouse clicks). Latency (the time it takes for a mouse click to travel from your local PC to the remote server) becomes more of an issue as new problems like “ghosting” can start to occur. Even though the small differences in latency (0.2 seconds for example) appear small, the reality to the user is they are constantly waiting for the screen to catch up when typing and any animation can render the session unusable.

The distance your IT Company is from your main office is will likely become an issue. As the majority of problems would now appear at the server side these can be dealt with remotely. Moving the servers offsite as part of a hosted desktop migration can (particularly is underspecified) begin to cause issues with connectivity or comm.’s.  Issues caused by your local network, switch, router, broadband, local PC or Thin Client will still require someone onsite to respond. The further away your IT support company is the less likely they are to “pop” over to investigate an intermittent issue. More often than not an issue isn’t as simple as the router has failed. Often certain users or issues at a particular time of day can occur which will drag on if the IT Support Company are not local or willing to have engineers onsite to investigate.

Support

The Support service is another key differentiator. At some point, hosted or not, your will experience problems and will need an IT specialist to help resolve the problem. Most organisations will at some point have worked with a substandard IT support company, one who does the minimum and more often than not charges the least too. The term “You get what you pay for” springs to mind but the lure of reduced costs can be too appealing. It’s important to factor in that you will need to have ongoing discussions (not all bad!) with your IT support company and often the best way to get a feel for the type of company they are is to;

1)      Ask for references that you can contact

2)      Ask for a recent set of accounts to check they are profitable

3)      Most important of all, visit the support office and meet the staff you will working with

Proactive Monitoring

As a Hosted Desktop customer you won’t need to get involved in the ongoing management of your network (don’t forget although it is hosted, it is still your network!) however you need to be sure that it is being managed correctly. After all it’s your data they are hosting and there’s not many businesses can survive a total loss of businesses data.

Hosted Desktop Comparison recommends a multi-tiered approach to the ongoing management be used. The industry standard SNMP monitoring is the basic solution that should be used to avoid servers failing because of obvious issues. However a more advanced monitoring solution is definitely preferred. Microsoft has developed a highly granular monitoring solution based on Synthetic Transaction Monitoring. The STM monitoring solution is application aware and avoids many more issues occurring than just the SNMP solution. More information on STM (synthetic Transaction Monitoring) is provided in the “What is a hosted desktop?” section.

Infrastructure Comparison

Second to the ongoing support, the infrastructure used to host your desktop is of critical importance. Many Hosted Desktop providers do use servers to host the desktop but the most reliable and robust solutions utilise virtualisation technologies like VMware. At a basic level VMware allows hosted desktop providers to recovery 10x-20x faster in the event of a server failing, or even avoid downtime completely.  A Virtualised environment utilising SAN technology is a must have!

Sharing Servers

Using 1 large (none virtualised) server to host many users and various companies should be avoided where ever possible. From bitter experience this is a recipe for disaster. The more applications, printers, drivers, etc installed the higher the likelihood of the server developing issues. When a single users or even a small group of users has a problem then whole server (all the users and businesses using it) need to stop working while the server is rebooted. This solution is usually offered at a discounted price, but unless your businesses can function with regular downtime and system outages Hosted Desktop Comparison would recommend this be left alone.

Comparison of VDI vs. TS vs. Citrix

In short, VDI is taking your PC and installing it in a data centre. You will often have full access to install software and generally do what you want, great?! Not so great, as the issues you faced before like performance issues, error messages, corruptions etc will continue to affect your virtual PC or Hosted Desktop session. Some Hosted Desktop providers lock this down or even generate a fresh desktop every time you login which does avoid many of these issues and provides a consistent experience. One of the main benefits of using VDI is any program that will work on windows XP will work on a VDI hosted desktop.

Terminal Services is the long running tried and tested solution. Microsoft has been developing this over many years and the product has been updated with each new releases of Windows Server. It offers a centralised and standardised desktop. With almost all mainstream products supported by Terminal Services it’s a solid and robust method for providing a Hosted Desktop service.

Citrix has been around for almost as long as Terminal Services and is actually a bolt-on or module that provides IT managers a much simpler facility for managing large implementation of hosted desktops. The users also experience improvements with sound and video as Citrix have created their own connection client which will make a video almost watchable.  Many organisations still choose Terminal Services for a Hosted Desktop as the added expense for Citrix and the low number of staff with a genuine requirement for watching video at work rules out this solution.