A great user experience is key for the success of any Citrix/VDI initiative. To ensure user satisfaction and productivity, Citrix administrators should monitor the user experience proactively, detect times when users are likely to be seeing slowness, pinpoint the cause of such issues and initiate corrective actions to quickly resolve issues.

Virtualization technology is being widely adopted thanks to the flexibility, agility, reliability and ease of administration it offers. At the same time, any IT technology – hardware or software – is only as good as its maintenance and upkeep, and VMware virtualization is no different. With physical machines, failure or poor performance of a machine affects the applications running on that machine. With virtualization, multiple virtual machines (VMs) run on the same physical host and a slowdown of the host will affect applications running on all of the VMs. Hence, performance monitoring is even more important in a virtualized infrastructure than it is in a physical infrastructure.

How does one determine what would be the right amount of resources to allocate to a VM? The answer to that question lies in tracking the resource usage of VMs over time, determining the norms of usage and then right-sizing the VMs accordingly.

But how does one track the resource usage metrics for VMs and which ones are important? VMware vSphere comprises many different resource components. Knowing what these components are and how each component influences resource management decisions is key to efficiently managing VM performance. In this blog, we will discuss the top 10 metrics that every VMware administrator must continuously track.

Citrix application and desktop virtualization technologies are widely used by organizations that are embarking on digital transformation initiatives. The success of these initiatives is closely tied to ensuring a great user experience for end users as they access their virtual apps and desktops. Given the multitude of components and services that make up the Citrix delivery architecture, administrators constantly face an uphill challenge in measuring performance and knowing what key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor.

We have invited George Spiers (https://www.jgspiers.com/), who is a Citrix architect with rich experience in consulting and implementing Citrix technologies for organizations in various sectors, to write this guest blog and enlighten us on the topic of Citrix monitoring. George is also a Citrix Technology Professional and has contributed immensely to the Citrix community. Read on to see what George thinks are the top 10 most important metrics that Citrix administrators must monitor.

Not too long ago, a copy of Randall Munroe’s “Thing Explainer” made its way around the SolarWinds office—passing from engineering to marketing to development to the Head Geeks™ (yes, that’s actually a job at SolarWinds. It’s pretty cool.), and even to management.

Amid chuckles of appreciation, we recognized Munroe had struck upon a deeper truth: as IT practitioners, we’re often asked to describe complex technical ideas or solutions. However, often it’s for folks who need a simplified version. These may be people who consider themselves non-technical, but just as easily it could be for people who are technical in a different discipline. Amid frustrated eye-rolling we’re asked to “explain it to me like I’m five years old” (a phrase shortened to just “Explain Like I’m Five,” or ELI5, in forums across the internet).

There, amid the blueprints and stick figures, were explanations of the most complex concepts in hyper-simplified language that had achieved the impossible alchemy of being amusing, engaging, and accurate.

We were inspired. What you hold in your hands (or read on your screen) is the result of this inspiration.

In this book, we hope to do for IT what Randall Munroe did for rockets, microwaves, and cell phones: explain what they are, what they do, and how they work in terms anyone can understand, and in a way that may even inspire a laugh or two.

Companies have NAS systems all over the place—hardware-centric devices that make data difficult to migrate and leverage to support the business. It’s natural that companies would desire to consolidate those systems, and vFilO is a technology that could prove to be quite useful as an assimilation tool. Best of all, there’s no need to replace everything. A business can modernize its IT environment and finally achieve a unified view, plus gain more control and efficiency via the new “data layer” sitting on top of the hardware. When those old silos finally disappear, employees will discover they can find whatever information they need by examining and searching what appears to be one big catalog for a large pool of resources.

And for IT, the capacity-balancing capability should have especially strong appeal. With it, file and object data can shuffle around and be balanced for efficiency without IT or anyone needing to deal with silos. Today, too many organizations still perform capacity balancing work manually—putting some files on a different NAS system because the first one started running out of room. It’s time for those days to end. DataCore, with its 20-year history offering SANsymphony, is a vendor in a great position to deliver this new type of solution, one that essentially virtualizes NAS and object systems and even includes keyword search capabilities to help companies use their data to become stronger, more competitive, and more profitable.