Sorry to go way off the path when it comes to my normal rants and posts about technology, I had a bit of a revelation this morning and felt compelled to share it. With any IT job there are times where you are frustrated with management, where you are selling your idea to someone up the chain and you realize that your idea tends to be influenced by some new technology that someone else is selling you. That’s when the light bulb goes off and you say to yourself, “well I guess I could be a pre-sales engineer too” only you don’t like the idea of working on commission. Still as an on site engineer you rely somewhat on SE’s to help provide the data that makes your business case, because after all you are “just an IT geek” in the eyes of management.

The funny thing about this revelation is I have had it several times before where I realized that I have always been selling my plans to those above me. Two years ago I joined a company called Technician Professionals (Tec-Pros) and quickly climbed the corporate ladder (ok I was employee number 6 so it wasn’t much of a climb). In that time the company grew to 35 employees and my role as lead Technologist or Director of IT Operations or whatever I was called evolved with our growth.

We were very successful at first trading on just our skills and reputation to perform great work, but as time went on we needed to grow the business. It was then that I started talking to customers about what Tec-Pros could do for them and having technology and road map conversations about the future of virtualization in the corporate structure. All the while I was still performing installs and building virtual desktop infrastructures and looking towards the future. Things have shifted somewhat and while I am still very technical my role is now to train the newer staff on how to perform the engagements and manage the projects. I talk to people more about capabilities and best practices more now than I used to.

Over the course of my career I have seen many of my friends most of whom I viewed as the best and brightest go on to be SE’s at large vendors. So as I made a transition from doing to discussing it never hit me that I was actually changing from a script writing, keyboard punching engineer to a sales engineer. It certainly wasn’t my intention but it was what the company needed me to be. So now I am managing all IT operations and helping to drive sales for Tec-Pros. It’s not a bad gig either, it’s just like engineering only I get to be the one helping to push the idea forward. In the end I believe all good IT people are sales people, if you are trying to innovate you have to have buy in, and to gain that buy in you are selling your idea. SE’s just do it with margin.

First please let me apologize, sorry everyone, I have been tied up performing Production Roll-outs of VDI. It’s been a busy year and I am seeing more and more organizations move from Pilot to Production on their “Journey to the Cloud”. I feel there should be ominous music there.

The truth is VDI is becoming a mainstream idea, and it’s not just the cost savings of the life cycle extensions or the ease of management. I honestly believe it is more of a keeping up with the competition, as businesses begin to adopt a technology other businesses in the same market space will adopt the same or similar solutions to not lose any advantage.

To be honest I am an IT guy first and have only been looking at the business aspect of things for the last few years but it’s amazing to see how business drivers impact IT decisions. I wrote an article previously that expressed my belief that IT Directors and CIO’s could drive organizational change if they defined the verbiage. I am now starting to believe that my opinion will be ever evolving. Business cases whether sound or based off of what the other guys are doing will help to drive initiatives. It’s up to us as the IT resources to help and guide that initiative to meet our goals for our IT organization.

All of this makes planning and road mapping so critical to success, if you know where you want your organization to go, or have been told what the 5-10 year objective is. Than it’s time to sit down with a trusted IT adviser or advisers and put together the way forward. You may find that there are technology considerations that will impact you in year 3 that you can plan for now. A great example would be profile management. If your organization intends to deploy VDI in the future but are currently working on upgrading end user devices to newer PC’s with Windows 8 and you are moving off of Windows XP how will you make the user profile migration seem less? Will you lay the building blocks now to have a portable profile solution that will be flexible enough to move from your current solution to your future solutions without a great deal of effort.

Decoupling users and servers from physical devices is the “cloud” experience that everyone wants, it makes deployments faster easier and cheaper, the three points of the tri-force that no one ever seems to be able to get their arms around. It all comes down to planning, what may not be easier or cheaper now, will make things easier and cheaper in the next cycle. All we have to do is guide our organizations and show them the savings and a visual road map of what their goals and our are and how we get them there.

So how does your organization plan for the future?

Next post back to VDI and a Production roll out.

If you read Part 1 then you know the importance of the Assessment Phase of any Virtual Desktop engagement. The next step is the Pilot plan and design, a good consultant will ensure that they capture what it is you hope to accomplish by making the move to VDI.

Pilot Plan:

The assessment phase will help to identify the best use cases, the selection then comes down to what you are comfortable with, and what departments are willing to jump on the pilot bandwagon. The consultant should then determine the master image size based on assessment findings, taking an average of disk size, cpu, and memory. Any applications that are determined to be part of the master image, and any unique configuration changes should also be documented. User workshops should be performed to determine how they use their current environment, questions about desktop and machine customization, work habits, and current performance acceptance will be asked to determine what should be incorporated in the build. This will also help to identify use cases that may have been missed or overlooked in the assessment phase.

Design Phase: