EMA White Paper Citrix Desktop Automation

IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING

Desktop Automation:

Effective Desktop Operations

& Management with Cloud

Orchestration

An ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) White Paper Prepared for Citrix

August 2014

Table of Contents

©2014 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

Desktop Automation: Effective Desktop Operations

& Management with Cloud Orchestration

Executive Summary .......................................................................................................................... 1

Provisioning the Evolving Desktop ................................................................................................... 1

Empowering Users with Desktop Automation ................................................................................. 2

Make Informed Decisions on Capacity Planning for the Desktop Infrastructure ........................ 3

Optimize Scaling of Desktop Infrastructure ............................................................................... 4

Segment Desktop and Infrastructure Administration .................................................................. 4

Dynamically Provision Physical Resources When Needed .......................................................... 4

Create Standardized Desktop Templates that Support Distributed Clusters ................................ 5

Leverage Service Tiers .................................................................................................................. 5

Supporting Dev/Ops ................................................................................................................... 5

Ensure Desktops are Highly-Available and Eminently Recoverable ............................................. 6

Automating Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp Operations with CloudPlatform ...................................... 6

EMA Perspective ............................................................................................................................... 7

About Citrix ..................................................................................................................................... 7

http://www.enterprisemanagement.com

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Executive SummaryAs businesses strive to meet the evolving requirements for more flexible, reliable, and dynamic end-user computing services that empower end-user productivity, they look to adopt more dynamic processes for monitoring and managing desktop services. Rising to meet the challenges are desktop automation solutions that enable centralized management and holistic visibility into the provisioning and use of workspaces, applications, and other IT services. By leveraging the powerful features of a desktop automation implementation, organizations can make informed decisions on how to optimally configure, deploy, and service desktop resources.

Provisioning the Evolving DesktopThe world of desktop computing has changed. Gone are the days when a single desktop or laptop locally housed all the applications, data, and services users required to perform tasks essential to their job function. Today, users require access to IT resources that are served from a variety of sources (e.g. local desktop, enterprise server, cloud or web hosted) and accessible on any device they choose to employ (e.g. PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone, thin client). This has fundamentally changed the role of the desktop. Where once the desktop was intrinsically tied to a local device’s operating system, it is now recognized as an independent layer that may be remotely accessed from a centralized hosted environment. Nonetheless, users expect a consistent desktop experience regardless of which applications and services they are using and on which device they are being accessed. This is further complicated by the fact that different types of users have different sets of requirements. Each individual desktop, therefore, must be customized to meet the unique needs of each individual user.

Empowering users with today’s dynamic desktop environments is no trivial affair, and many organizations are challenged to meet expanding requirement without substantially increasing operational costs or administrative efforts. Traditional methods of provisioning and managing desktops are insufficient to keep up with the increased demands. The core of the problem is increased complexity as administrators struggle to maintain both desktops and the back-office systems that host IT resources. For instance, the excessive number of network, storage, and compute elements alone can be extremely challenging and time consuming to deploy, configure, and maintain, and the more effort administrators spend supporting these back-office systems, the less time they have available to directly address desktop requirements. While administrators may specialize in a few management practices, they often lack sufficient knowledge to comprehensively support them all, and senior-level support personnel with multi-discipline knowledge are hard to find and expensive to train.

End-user productivity is also diminished when IT operations lack visibility into how the supported desktops are being utilized. Unless the administrators understand which applications and services are actually being used, how they are being used, and who is using them, they are unable to make informed decisions on how to tune business IT resources to support individual business needs. These insights are essential for balancing costs with enterprise requirements. Overprovisioning desktops with hardware resources (e.g. CPU, memory, disk space) that will not be used to full capacity is eminently wasteful, and under-provisioning desktops will not provide users with the essential resources they need to effectively perform job tasks. Lacking visibility into desktop resource use, organizations often incorrectly guess at resource sizing, resulting in costly or ineffective deployments.

Users expect a consistent desktop and application

experience regardless of which applications and services they are using

and on which device they are being accessed.




Faced with these evolving challenges, enterprises require more pragmatic approaches to deliver desktop resources that balance costs, reliability, and functionality. At the same time, desktop provisioning efforts must be reduced to minimize operational costs and enable faster time-to-value in IT investments.

Empowering Users with Desktop AutomationThe key to streamlining desktop operations and management is the introduction of automation of IT resource provisioning and management – as opposed to manual distributed deployments – that enable administrators to easily identify and respond to end-user requirements. Desktop automation provides the unique and essential capabilities necessary to achieve this goal. Put simply, with desktop automation, desktop and application provisioning and delivery can be automated, and then remotely accessed by end users from any device they choose. In this way, administrators can manage resources collectively in a single location, rather than independently on each physical endpoint device. Further, services can be centrally managed across multiple data centers, network zones, or geographical locations. This solution can be hosted in any data center environment – including a virtualized data center, public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud – and may be located on-premise in an enterprise data center or off-premise at a facility managed by a service provider.

Figure 1: Provisioning user workspaces with Desktop Automation




Most often, desktop automation is initially adopted to reduce operational costs and administrative efforts. Since the service is hosted on existing cloud environments, there is no need to independently purchase, install, and maintain new infrastructure elements (e.g. server, storage, and networking components) to deliver enterprise IT services. Thanks to the elastic nature of cloud computing, enterprises only need pay for the compute resources they actually need to host desktops, applications, data, and other services, rather than having to purchase systems with unused capacity that sit idle just in case of an unexpected increase in load. Additionally, since cloud architectures are managed as independent services, desktop administrators do not need to have in-depth knowledge of the underlying infrastructure and can concentrate efforts on supporting the needs of end users and business-focused desktop requirements. This also means that desktop administrators do not require expensive skill sets necessary to cross multiple management disciplines.

For end users, the introduction of desktop automation means improved reliability of IT services and greater flexibility in how they access and consume resources. Desktops become highly-available and optimally performing as well as accessible from any device. Because IT administrators manage the platform centrally and can easily identify how IT resources are being used, they are more easily able to tune service offerings to meet individual user requirements. The result is a consistent desktop experience optimally configured to empower users with improved productivity.

These high-level qualities, however, only scratch the surface of the true value that can be achieved from the adoption of desktop automation. Each organization is different – with unique sets of requirements, user roles, applications, and device types – and the flexibility of desktop automation allows unique advantages to be achieved to meet a variety of individual challenges. Identified below are some examples of ways in which desktop automation can be leveraged to meet a variety of business requirements for improving user productivity while further reducing operational costs and efforts.

Make Informed Decisions on Capacity Planning for the Desktop InfrastructureThe key to effective capacity planning is to enable holistic visibility into the enterprise services being accessed by end users. Begin by leveraging the centralized monitoring of desktop automation to continuously record details on the deployment, access, and use of enterprise applications and services. This visibility should account for the interdependencies of complex system architectures. For example, the adoption rate of individual applications should also account for an increase in the adoption rate of any software subsystems (such as a database or messaging system) that are utilized by those applications. By historically trending the rate of application resource consumption, organizations can reliably predict when systems and services will need to be expanded, so they can plan for growth commiserate with budget availability. Rather than waiting for resources to run out before expanding capacities, IT operations can proactively expand popular resources before licenses run out or performance degrades. Further, administrators can selectively target only the specific components of the infrastructure (e.g. memory, storage, GPU, etc.) that actually need to be expanded to meet changing requirements – proactively supporting business growth while minimizing costs.

Holistic visibility also provides the information essential to maximizing the value achieved from existing IT investments. Application licenses and other resources that are identified as not actively being used

Rather than waiting for resources to run out before

expanding capacities, IT operations can proactively expand popular resources before licenses run out or

performance degrades.




can be retired, reclaimed, or repurposed. Additionally, workloads can be placed on the systems most appropriate to their value. For instance, low-use application can be hosted on slow-performing legacy systems or public clouds while critical applications are placed on more expensive, high-performing systems with built-in redundancy. In this way, IT infrastructures are right-sized to meet the level of support necessary for end-user focused workloads.

Optimize Scaling of Desktop Infrastructure By enabling planned capacity planning and the centralized configuration and deployment of desktop elements, opportunities are created to streamline provisioning processes. For example, the physical infrastructure supporting enterprise desktops can be proactively expanded to scale with the business – increasing the size and number of supported desktops (as well as applications and user-focused services) commiserates with the growth of the business and availability of enterprise budgets. In this way, sufficient resources are added as necessary to continuously meet business requirements while ensuring IT investments do not exceed budgetary restrictions by over-provisioning software and hardware components that will not be used. Similarly, elastic resources can be provisioned for short-term projects and released when they are no longer needed.

Centralized provisioning has the added benefit of simplifying deployment processes. The easier it is for administrators to implement new services and distribute them to user workspaces, the greater agility organizations have to meet changing business requirements. Faster uptime on desktop deployments also translates into rapid time-to-market on new business products service as well as improved customer satisfaction.

Segment Desktop and Infrastructure AdministrationRather than relying on a common set of administrators to support the entire IT ecosystem, with desktop automation, support teams are logically segmented so they can optimally focus on and specialize in technologies for which they are appropriately trained. Specifically, infrastructure administrators ensure desktop, applications, and other services are continuously available and optimized for high-performance, whereas desktop administrators provision these services and support user concerns without having to worry about infrastructure availability. This results in a faster response to provisioning and support requests as each team can operate independently with no need to coordinate support tasks between them. Additionally, this approach minimizes staff training and individual responsibilities since administrators need only be knowledgeable about the support functions applicable to their role. Personnel that are fully trained in the breadth of their responsibilities respond more quickly to service requests and are less prone to incidents of human error.

Dynamically Provision Physical Resources When NeededBy establishing common pools of server, storage, virtual, and network resources, the capacity of IT services can be automatically expanded on-demand. Proactive capacity planning processes accurately predict when additional resources will be needed to support existing services. Resources are then automatically delegated from available pools to the deficient service clusters, continually right-sizing the production environments and ensuring organizations are always able to meet their service objectives (e.g. to constantly meet SLA and compliance goals).




Dynamically provisioned infrastructure facilitates improved user self-service. Users can initiate the deployment of desktops, applications, and other services with little or no administrator interaction, and the IT environment will automatically adjust to accommodate the new or expanded load. Thus, administrator efforts are greatly reduced while the speed of desktop provisioning – and user satisfaction – is greatly improved.

Create Standardized Desktop Templates that Support Distributed ClustersWhen a standardized desktop template is established to support a common group of users, the speed and reliability of administrative tasks is increased. System and application updates, patches, and configuration changes only need to be applied once to each master template in order for them to propagate to each desktop they support. However, since the common set of user desktops may be distributed across multiple clusters (for instance, across multiple sites), it is essential that the standardized template centrally supports each desktop in the common group regardless of where it is physically hosted. Similarly, replicated environments that duplicate desktops for high-availability (e.g. failover disaster recovery) can be managed with this process to ensure desktops are always synchronized.

Leverage Service TiersNot all desktop requirements are equal. Organizations must balance cost versus performance for every workspace, application, or service accessible by users. The more highly-available and responsive a resource is required to be, the more expensive it will be to deploy and maintain. By offering multiple levels of desktop services, organizations can deliver services that exactly meet the requirements of different types of end users without catering to the highest common denominator. For example, a “platinum” level or high-priority service may be hosted in a clustered environment with SSD storage and accelerated network access, while a “bronze” level or low-priority service may include limited applications and storage space or may share resources with other users. Organizations can then charge back the cost of provisioning and maintaining each service based on the level of support required by each user.

Desktop automation simplifies the management of tiered services by employing a single interface to manage and assign services to individual desktops or groups of desktops. As budgets and requirements change, users can be easily moved up and down the tiered structure without the need to reprovision desktops.

Supporting Dev/OpsWith a desktop automation approach, development and test desktops can be easily provisioned to exactly replicate the state of a production environment. They can be deployed with the exact same template, eliminating the possibility of human error, and real-world details of desktop conditions and utilizations can be precisely modeled. In this way, developers can reliably reproduce production conditions to perform root cause analysis on failure or to determine the effects of introducing new services without affecting user productivity. Development or test desktops can be hosted on the same infrastructure that supports production systems or, if total isolation is required, hosted on a completely different environment while still being managed from the same centralized management interface. When no longer needed, these desktops can be easily released, returning any system, network, or storage resource back to the pools from which they were provisioned.




Ensure Desktops are Highly-Available and Eminently RecoverableEnvironment failures can be extremely disruptive to user productivity when desktops are hosted in a single static location. By distributing desktops across multiple zones, their availability is not diminished in the event of an isolated environment failure. Additionally, by sharing multiple zones, workspace performance is automatically load-balanced, ensuring optimal performance for all users.

Automating Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp Operations with

CloudPlatformRecognizing the extensive value that can be achieved from a desktop automation approach, desktop workspace solution provider, Citrix, has introduced a platform that enables its leading virtualization technologies, XenDesktop and XenApp, to be deployed and provisioned on Citrix CloudPlatform private or hosted cloud infrastructures. The platform can also manage desktops hosted on public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), all from a single, centralized management console. The unified service delivery architecture has been purpose-built to provision and manage all enterprise desktops and applications, regardless of where they are being hosted or on which device they are being accessed.

Centralized desktop management enables the development of a common set of user templates. Each template includes a specific set of configurations, attributes, and policies that can be applied to individual users or groups of users based on their requirements or job functions, regardless whether the applicable desktops are hosted in a single location or in multiple locations. This consolidated management allows organizations to standardize provisioning and management practices, ensuring consistency across the support stack. Additionally, enabling “one-stop shopping” for all desktop provisioning tasks reduces administrator efforts as a single template change can be simultaneously applied to all desktops in a group. Conversely, businesses can take advantage of the built-in multitenancy to logically segment a single desktop infrastructure to support multiple organizations, each with its own unique management interface. In fact, multi-site support can be used in conjunction with multitenancy, allowing independent organizations the ability to leverage resources common to other organizations at multiple sites.

The Citrix Desktop Automation solution also includes features for managing tiered desktops services. Policies are established that define the level of desktop support, which will be applied to each tier. For instance, a policy may specify which software and/or infrastructure pools may be assigned to specific tiers of service selected by workload owners. In this way, the amount of security, performance, and high-availability required by end users for each workload is appropriately balanced with the cost of meeting those obligations.

Another advantage to the Citrix approach is that the capacity of desktop services is scalable on-demand. With centralized management infrastructure elements (such as host, clusters, pods, or zones) can be rapidly provisioned whenever required, but only when needed, ensuring the desktop environment is neither over-provisioned nor under-provisioned. Additionally, a single interface can be employed to deploy desktops to both public or private CloudPlatform hosted desktops. The Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp automation solution delivers the visibility, flexibility, and resiliency essential to achieving optimal value in a desktop automation deployment.




EMA PerspectiveAs user requirements continue to evolve to include a greater reliance on applications and services from a wide variety of sources, traditional methods for managing desktop environments are becoming increasingly unsustainable. Desktop automation provides the capabilities necessary to meet the desktop management requirements of today while setting the stage for meeting the progressing challenges of tomorrow. By enabling true centralized management of all user devices, applications, data, and services, desktop automation provides holistic visibility to enable informed decision-making on optimal configuration and proactive capacity planning while reducing administrative efforts and operational costs.

While desktop automation offers substantial opportunities for improved manageability and cost-effectiveness in enterprise desktop provisioning, some IT managers may be resistant to the approach. Primary detractors to the adoption of desktop automation typically fixate on concerns for the reliability, performance and security of the service – particularly if the platform is hosted on a public cloud. In reality, however, the exact opposite is typically true. Resources-strapped organizations typically lack the technology and knowledgeable staff necessary to effectively meet enterprise IT goals. Conversely, service providers or other organizations dedicated to hosting desktop resources are supported by experienced administrators and automated platforms specifically selected to ensure SLA requirements will be met. In fact, desktop hosting organizations stake their reputations on their ability to deliver optimal services, so they are often better at accomplishing these goals than a more general administration team responsible for meeting a much broader range of IT requirements.

Of particular note, achieving regulatory compliance with a desktop automation implementation can be an especially challenging barrier to breach for exceptionally security-conscious organizations. However, this can be largely mitigated by employing a hybrid solution. Sensitive desktops can be hosted behind an enterprise firewall on a secure private cloud while non-regulated desktops can be moved to a less secure environment (such as a public cloud) to reduce overall costs. However, to be effectively managed, ALL desktops must still be managed from a single, centralized interface. In this way, compliance requirements are achieved with minimal expenditures because costly security-hardened resources are only extended to the desktops that need them.

With desktop automation solutions – such as the Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp Automation with CloudPlatform solution – IT organizations can optimize the efficiency and effectiveness of the operations and management of their desktop and application deployments while reducing administrative efforts and improving end user flexibility and productivity.

About CitrixCitrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) is a leader in mobile workspaces, providing virtualization, mobility management, networking and cloud services enabling new ways to work better. Citrix solutions power business mobility through secure, personal workspaces that provide people with instant access to apps, desktops, data and communications on any device, over any network and cloud. Citrix solutions are in use at more than 330,000 organizations and by over 100 million users globally. Learn more at www.citrix.com.

http://www.citrix.com

About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

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EMA White Paper Citrix Desktop Automation