Andrew Sweeney
When many of us relocated to working full- or part-time from home in 2020, we thought it would be a temporary measure, but as time has progressed many companies are seeing the benefits of tapping into a talent pool of workers that can collaborate remotely. It seems that working from home is here to stay in one form or another.
As a result, more companies are deploying Windows Virtual Desktop to help:
Cost is based on consumption – you only pay for the licenses you use. But to right-size capacity and optimize costs, you’ll need to know more about your users, usage patterns, and business needs. Here are some tips to help you with your balancing act:
You can create a Virtual Machine (VM) for each user and assign capacity in line with their peak usage – but doing that you’ll likely be paying for capacity they will never use. Here are a few options to mitigate this:
To successfully implement these options and optimize usage and costs, you’ll need to:
Done manually this is going to take time and headcount, and it’s not a one-off task! To align with business and employee changes, you’ll have to monitor usage and update your source data regularly.
To balance costs with capacity required you’ll want to rapidly scale up service when it’s needed and scale down or turn off if it’s no longer required. But to do this with any success, you’ll need to regularly revisit your data to understand employee and business changes and align with key decision makers to confirm when to turn off VMs or reallocate capacity in host pools.
Are there strict working hours in your organization, meaning that everyone signs on and off the network by certain times of the day? Good news if that’s the case! You can switch off your virtual machines outside of office hours and save approximately 27% of the cost of having them always available!
At some companies, if you do this, you’re not going to be popular – you’ll want to ensure people working outside of core office hours can do their jobs. Again, you’re going to have to spend time communicating with business heads and managers to understand:
It’s clear that if you want to optimize the usage and costs of Windows Virtual Desktop for your company, you’re going to have to balance cost savings with the costs you incur by allocating resources to monitoring usage patterns, collating data from AD, and communicating with the business and users.
Done manually, you won’t be able to right-size in real-time, you will have to accept paying for some unused capacity to make sure you meet the needs of every user! If you want even more agility and flexibility, you may want to consider adopting a greater level of automation!
ReadyWorks allows you to cut the costs of using Windows Virtual Desktop by:
Schedule a demo with ReadyWorks to see how you can automate the repeatable tasks associated with managing Windows Virtual Desktop to cut activities by 50% or more and right-size capacity for your users in real-time.