In this guide, you’ll learn more about our Virtual Workspace Services and the best practices we’ve developed based on our experience as a leading IT services provider.

At Dell Services, we know the drive to reinvent, reimagine and reignite firsthand. We’re helping companies across the globe realize these goals every day, addressing the challenges of today and getting them future ready for what tomorrow may bring.

Like you, we realize that it’s about much more than devices. It’s about your enterprise growing with worker mobility, security and business agility as key enablers. It’s about focusing on people and giving them the tools they need. Let us help.

This document is for informational purposes only and may contain typographical errors and technical inaccuracies. The content is provided as is, without express or implied warranties of any kind.

© 2016 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Dell and its affiliates cannot be responsible for errors or omissions in typography or photography. Dell and the Dell logo are trademarks of Dell Inc. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products. Dell disclaims proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.

About this guide

Introduction

What’s it all about and where to begin

How we look at things

Critical business and technical questions

Our methodologies and tools

Technical considerations

Connections matter — networking basics

Table of contents

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This document provides examples, tips and general recommendations for developing and providing virtual workspace environments to enterprise workers and employees.

We hope it provides insights into questions you may have when implementing an enterprise-scale virtualized workspace transformation with solutions such as Dell Workspace-as-a-Service.

Keep in mind that these are guidelines and not fixed rules that must be followed. While they identify and describe general courses of action, they are not presented as a substitute for the advice of professionals experienced in developing and rolling out virtual workspaces at an enterprise scale.

Dell Services professionals are available for further discussion and consultation.

Introduction

It’s not just a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), it’s about delivering choice and agility.

Investing in providing workers with choices opens up new ways for enterprises to operate – both how and where.

Device options today fall into three main categories:

• IT provided: the traditional model of IT-provided and -controlled devices• Choose your own device (CYOD): a pre-defined set of company-supplied devices• Bring your own device (BYOD): employees and workers use

their personal devices for work activities

The best way to manage this is with a tiered approach using:

What’s it all about and where to begin

Data Applications Devices Policies

Manage diverse applications, worker needs and business goals

Improve security

Increase worker mobility

Simplify IT

Align IT portfolio to growth

Deliver legacy applications with new user devices and technologies

They can help:

Virtual workspaces are strategic to the enterprise

Where to begin depends on your goals and priorities

• Improve productivity and increase revenue generation opportunities• Fulfill expectations of consumer devices and mobile work locations• Improve employee satisfaction• Improve talent acquisition and retention

• Improve mobile data security• Redirect IT to innovation• Simplify deployment and management of assets while managing costs• Improve IT process and policy adherence

Line of business goals

CIO and IT staff goals

of workers regularly use more than one device.1

of employees work an average of two hours per week in public places.1

Desire to adopt consumer devices, cloud and mobility to drive business value

Need new ways to integrate new technology with legacy architectures and applications

Need to increase the security of data and applications for end users

Preferences for how technology and services are delivered and consumed will continue to evolve.

What we’re hearing from our customers

1“The Global Evolving Workforce” study, Dell, 2014 http://PowerMore.Dell.com/business/evolvingworkforce/

60% 35%

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2

3

Business imperatives

We utilize a worker-centered design methodology.

How we look at things

1Objectives

Answering why and who

2Business

requirements Answering

what 3Technical

requirements Answering

how

4Approach

Identifying the transformation

path

5Design

Enabling a holistic solution design

6Analysis

Discovering worker needs

• What is the goal of the transformation?• Why take this on? Why now?• Should you utilize centralized (versus decentralized) management?• What are our priorities?

Culturally

Expectations

Thinking of undergoing a transformation? Ask yourself these critical business and cultural questions.

• What is the right balance of line of business and worker involvement?• What is an achievable timeframe to complete transformation?• How many users will be impacted?• Have you outlined a single goal versus multi-goals?

• Do you know the number of data centers, sites and regions that will be utilized?• Are you ready to address the complexity of your environment?• What are the number of use cases you should consider?

Technical capability

Complexity

Ask yourself the following critical technical questions.

• Have you assessed the number of applications and their readiness for virtualization?• Is your network optimized for the change ahead?• Have you designed your user’s desktop images and considered what OS will be used?• Are you considering end-user customization?

• Keep as independent of an end point device strategy as possible.• Don’t worry — we’ll work with you deciding a regional or global implementation

strategy during the design phase.• Take advantage of user self-service capabilities where possible to earn big

dividends in user acceptance and resource demand.• Tackle the complexities of multiple user groups and business units from the start.

Multiple virtualization technologies

Other helpful tips

Our methodologies and tools

• Presented applications• Shared session desktops• Dedicated virtual desktops• Persistent virtual desktops

One of the main goals of transformation is to increase adoption of workspace virtualization – it won’t happen by decree or by itself.

Moving from physical to virtual is transformational

Remember to not get tied up in having to have one type or another. Finding the most efficient means is what’s key.

Our worker-centered transformation framework

Our user-profile centered approachWe’ve developed practice methodologies that address varied needs of enterprise-scale transformation to a virtual workspace. Organizational needs and challenges are unique.

Define business objectives and constraints

Define transformation approach

Business and technical requirements

Assess current state and plans/roadmaps

Develop the solution

Build team

Discover and analyze current state

Define governance model

Establish project management processes and tools

Collaboratively define and prioritize groups

Procure, deploy, and integrate the infrastructure

Develop migration procedures

Define and develop images

Rationalize and prepare applications

Implement service management processes

Plan for user group or site

Prepare environment

Verify user group requirements

Prepare sites, end users and support

Migrate users

Proactive infrastructure management

End-user service desk

ITIL-basedService management

• Incident• Request• Problem• Capacity• Change• Release• Configuration• Service level• KnowledgePlan and

development effortConduct pilot

Define migration schedule

Post-migration support

Define the solution

Plan the transformation

Develop and implement the solution

Migrate end users

Manage service

Tools

Dell Services utilizes several tools to automate, streamline and manage transformation activities. The purpose of each tool is to provide a consistent transition; the implementation will vary based on your requirements.

During the transformation, data will be pulled from tools you already have in your environment (such as Software Center or Active Directory).

End-user analytics

• Analyzes end-user activity - Software usage - Use cases

• Used initially during the pre-sales phase

• Continued use during the analyze and design phase - Refreshes data during the

transformation process

Client deployment manager (CDM)

• Used to schedule, track and report end- user migrations

• Used during the migrate phase of transformation

• Provides a real-time view of migration activity• Includes customer management on-

demand reports• Offers the ability to survey end users and

incorporate resulting data into work orders

Migration tools

• Used to move end-user profiles and data into the virtual environment where necessary

• Customized based on your specific requirements

Processes

Transformation tools and processes

Design and build infrastructure and environment

• The transformation team will interview existing data center staff to document current processes and procedures

• The team will need to understand how your business implements all IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes in the environment

Migrate data

• Data migration processes will be customized to reduce the impact on the network as much as possible

• We use a variety of industry-standard toolsets for migrations

• Migration processes will be communicated to end users prior to the beginning of their migration

Identify use cases and user information

• Data will be pulled from existing sources• Transformation resources will interview business

leads in affected areas to better understand factors such as needs and personnel requirements

• End-user analytics toolset will be used to pull app usage data

Schedule end-user migration

• Migration scheduling processes will vary based on your needs and use case(s)

• Client deployment managers will be used to track end-user schedules, regardless of how the schedule is developed

We offer choices to help you build a quality user experience that works for your organization.

Technical considerations

Premium+ Persistent desktop

Dedicated desktop

Session desktop

App delivery

Personalization of user settings

Personal application installation

Power/dedicated user

Mobile workers

High data center efficiencies

User reporting and analytics

Simplified management

Management

Efficiency

Customization

Security

Dell Virtual Workspace Services

Virtualized apps• Apps are streamed or presented

User and application personalization• User desktop customizations• User settings persistence

Regional/departmental application core• Apps that are installed directly into the image• Apps that are not suitable for virtualization• Common applications that every user needs

VDI core• Base Windows OS• OS patches and service packs• Security software• Security configuration settings

Through our years of experience, we’ve found that defining a specific core image as the initial basis and then utilizing that image for additional regional/departmental images provides a number of efficiencies for development and subsequent management.

We can work with you to define a decision matrix that we can then use to govern when new images are required. In other words, we let the needs of your business and users drive image development.

Image recommendations

Network requirements can be broken down into three categories — utilization/capacity, priority and latency.

Utilization and capacity• In our experience, customers usually begin with around 100KB per

endpoint aggregated across the user base. This is based on average day-to-day tasks and doesn’t account for bandwidth-impacting activities like video, audio or large data transfers.

• For a smooth transition, you should ensure that your sites are not experiencing severely high utilization periods.

Priority — quality of service (QoS) and class of service (CoS)• We recommend that you enable and configure CoS on your WAN to

optimize the end-user experience.• You should also ensure that your carrier provides a sufficient committed

access rate to support the input and output needs of your organization.

Latency• Latency refers to the amount of time it takes for data to travel between

locations over a network. This is important to consider as geographic distance and fiber-optic speed of data travel can’t be changed.

• Several other factors can be analyzed to ensure network performance is not being impeded externally beyond existing distance/data transfer speed factors, including: - Telecommunications or networking issues and bandwidth congestion - Router errors and utilization

• Latency across the continental United States is less than 100 milliseconds, barring any network issues. Our recommendation, based on experience and industry best practices, is a latency of less than 250 milliseconds for average users.

• We also recommend that latency, where present, be made as consistent as possible.

Connections matter – networking basics

Networking: Three critical considerations

Dell Virtual Workspace Services

Be sure to visit our Virtual Workspace Services page to learn how we can help you get future ready.

Product and service availability varies by country.  To learn more, customers and Dell Channel Partners should contact their sales representative for more information.  Specifications are correct at date of publication but are subject to availability or change without notice at any time.  Dell and its affiliates cannot be responsible for errors or omissions in typography or photography.  Dell’s Terms and Conditions of Sales and Service apply and are available on request.  Dell and the Dell logo are trademarks of Dell Inc.  Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products.  Dell disclaims proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.  © 2016 Dell Inc.  All rights reserved.May 2016 | D725- Virtual Workspace Services Best Practices.indd | Rev. 1.2