User experience and desktop analysis tools

There are several different third-party, complementary products on the market that you can use to conduct the analysis. You are often able to use the services of a partner to assist with this process to help you understand the information and data that's been gathered.

One of the most popular solutions is the Liquidware Stratusphere solution. Stratusphere not only provides you with a detailed breakdown of the current user environment, with highlights such as a detailed breakdown of the login process, consumption reports, and a score to easily identify which users are virtualization candidates—it also provides that complete end user life cycle picture.

Stratusphere takes the baseline data and then uses that to continuously monitor the end user experience so that you can ensure that your VDI solution is optimized, as shown in the following screenshot. We will discuss this in more detail later in this book:

One thing to ensure is that the assessment solution is designed specifically for measuring desktops and not servers. The two technologies, although both virtualization technologies, are completely different, and while you could probably use desktop assessment software to plan your server virtualization project, it simply would not work the other way around.

As well as actually collecting the assessment data, there are several other points that you should take into consideration and look at. This will help you understand what some of the raw assessment data is telling you. For example, it might tell you that a specific user is unsuitable to have a virtual desktop due to the number of resources it consumes; however, when you speak to them, you may find that whatever they are doing isn't going to be relevant in VDI.