VDI Tune-Up Tips: How to Keep It Running Smoothly

While Virtual Desktop Infrastructures have become increasingly easy to maintain, they still need the occasional intervention of an alert system administrator to stay in tip-top shape. Which is one reason that a few VDI tips from an experienced IT administrator are always helpful to have.

Eric Schwinger, with Interstates Control Systems, supplied some recently, with No. 1 being to make good use of your hypervisor's built-in alert system. (All of them have some way of notifying system administrators when things go wrong, including email or text alerts.)

Among the events Schwinger suggests keeping a lookout for are CPU performance getting maxed out, system memory running low or network connections getting lost. Those events usually result in users with broken VMs, who will start calling the help desk for support; keeping a step ahead of the problem, said Schwinger, can save everyone a lot of grief.

Another tip: Be as diligent in patching your hypervisor software as you are with your client operating systems. VDI-related patches come out at a regular interval, which an IT department should closely monitor, said Schwinger. Obviously, the stakes are high: A security problem in a hypervisor can take down not just one desktop, but an entire fleet of them. 

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