6 Tips for Reducing Costs When Transitioning Physical Desktop Users to OpenStack VDI

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a great solution for transitioning workstations out from under people’s desks and onto a centrally hosted platform. It can be a powerful approach to overcoming some of today’s top business challenges like managing remote accessibility and a geographically distributed workforce. That said, if you’re looking at legacy full stack VDI options, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the complexity and costs to get up and running.

Most organizations don’t want to invest more money into technology than they need to, which is what makes OpenStack VDI such a compelling alternative to traditional hosting platforms. Leveraging the opensource powerhouse inherently offers a less expensive substitute. Since OpenStack is a cloud native solution, it turns your datacenter and your VDI environment into a cloud-based model, which means you can manage consumption better.  This helps to lower the total cost of ownership of the actual infrastructure itself while avoiding the technology debt that is often incurred when you’re locked into a traditional VDI stack.

To finalize your OpenStack VDI initiative, you’ll need a remote desktop connection management platform like the one provided by Leostream to authenticate users.  Not only does Leostream provide a complete solution for user assignments to virtual machines, but it can also be utilized in a variety of ways to reduce the overall costs of your hosted desktop environment.

Let’s explore:

1. Monitor power consumption: One of the practical methods for lowering VDI costs in the cloud is to track and plan for power consumption. The dashboard reporting features within Leostream displays overall insights to track usage patterns and helps you to determine when to add or remove compute nodes. Keeping a close eye ensures you’re only paying for capacity when it’s actually needed.
2. Automate elastic capacity and power state: Through a tight OpenStack API integration, Leostream lets you automate numerous tasks associated with managing elastic capacity and the power state of your OpenStack cloud hosted resources.  For example, you can create new instances when they’re needed then tear them back down when they aren’t. Plus, you can power control machines to save on power. All of these tasks can be 100% automated to ensure resources are not running unnecessarily.
3. Leverage desktop pools: Depending on the situation, having one-to-one dedicated virtual machines assigned to users may make sense. However, more often than not, you’ll want to take advantage of the extensive pooling options within Leostream to provision desktops on demand from a shared pool. For the end-user, logging into their desktop is completely seamless and they never know the difference. The advantage of using pools is to help maximize resource usage and improve your bottom line.

5. Use an economical protocol where applicable: Since most full-stack VDI vendors include a remote display protocol you don’t have the option of choosing based on performance requirements. What’s unique about combining OpenStack VDI and Leostream is that you can select from a range of protocol providers to pick the best protocol(s) for the job and those that fit your budget. By doing so, you only pay for heavy duty protocols when necessary and can otherwise opt for more economical versions. Options include VNC , RDP, and SSH for task workers and popular providers like HP ZCentral Remote Boost, Mechdyne TGX, Amazon DCV, No Machine, and Scyld for graphics intense or GPU heavy workloads.
6. Go hybrid! With the inclusion of Leostream as part of your OpenStack VDI, you can mix and match a wide variety of technology to help cut costs where applicable. From hosting platforms, to display protocols, to authentication providers, you can plug and play vendors that make the most sense for your business objectives and for your wallet.
7. Consider partnering with a service provider: Even with all of the available ways to reduce costs, building out a VDI solution from scratch is still a daunting feat for small IT teams. You may see a better return on your investment by outsourcing the upfront implementation to a service provider that specializes in OpenStack VDI. Leostream recently partnered with Virtuozzo to help organizations expertly build, manage, and scale their OpenStack VDI programs.

Are you curious about how it all comes together behind the scenes? Check out our video for an overview of migrating users from physical desktops to OpenStack VDI, including a product demonstration of the Leostream Platform.