Quest Software recently signed an agreement to license source code from Liquidware Labs, a desktop transformation solution provider founded by David Bieneman, who earlier founded Vizioncore, a virtualization backup and management company that was acquired by Quest back in 2007.
With this new agreement in place, Quest was able to release its own Quest branded utility, VDI Assessment, which is a free product designed to help identify which physical desktops and users within an organization are best suited to be migrated over to a VDI or desktop virtualization environment.
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Quest said it was making this technology available as a free download with the hopes of empowering IT departments to perform their own assessments, rather than require an organization to enlist the help of a professional services engagement. Doing so, the company expects to see faster adoption of desktop virtualization in all its forms, and it hopes to provide clear guidance as to which users and desktops these organizations should virtualize first.
Assessment tools like this are becoming an important -- and required -- component for any successful VDI desktop deployment. Kicking off any VDI project requires proper planning. Furthermore, any good plan should first determine which desktops, users, and applications are a good fit to be migrated from a physical environment to a virtual environment, as well as the candidates that should not be moved.
The basic idea is that you install the assessment tool in your existing environment. Over a period of 30 days or more, the software will gather important data about the environment, analyzing both desktop performance and user behavior over time in order to build up a complete picture of application usage and resource consumption across the organization. It can help determine which users or desktops can be moved over to a VDI environment or which applications may cause problems if moved -- basically, it takes the guesswork out of the deployment process by identifying for you the best targets for success.
The performance metrics collected during the assessment can evaluate how well the infrastructure will perform when moving to a virtual desktop solution such as Quest vWorkspace, VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop, and/or Windows 7. In addition, questions of sizing and scaling, infrastructure needs, and TCO/ROI can be more easily quantified.