HaysMed quickly identifies VDI performance issues with Xangati Customer Success Story
Hays Medical Center is a private, not-for-profit hospital maintaining a local market share of nearly 90% and staffing more than one thousand associates and physicians. With a total of 6,696 admissions and 173,321 outpatient procedures documented last year, the medical group's specialty and rural health clinics accounted for more than 145,464 office visits. In addition, the DeBakey Heart Institute had 2,374 admissions while the Dreiling/Schmidt Cancer Institute provided services to 2,580. Last year, 721 births were also recorded at the hospital while 13,644 patients were seen in the Emergency Department. Prior to Xangati, HaysMed was primarily relying on user feedback, network traffic, or application-level statistics to try to gain a comfort level. Their VMware VDI environment started small, but over the years the number of users started to grow quite rapidly and the complexity began to build. At one point, some quite serious performance issues began to arise. Performance issues in VDI can be extremely difficult to troubleshoot. But with Xangati, that all changed.
The Problem Over a period of several months, HaysMed added several new remote facilities. Their EHR system was extremely latency-sensitive, so the typical approach was to purchase metroethernet connections (low latency but low bandwidth) to these sites. In the past, HaysMed monitored these links with Cacti or Solarwinds, so it could see when utilization on the metro reached a point that would cause issues for end-users. They could see it happening; but finding the cause would often take hours - if they were able to find it at all.
The Solution James Billinger, Systems Engineering Professional of HaysMed said, "We started terminating the metro connections to our new sites with NetFlow-capable firewalls. This lets us feed the info back to Xangati, which can monitor the link itself or the entire remote site in real-time at a persession basis. Now, when we see utilization on one of these links spike, we can look at the Xangati VDI dashboard and find out immediately who and what are causing the issue. This has been so helpful that we’ve started replacing the firewalls in our existing facilities as well."
HaysMed had also been converting most of its network storage (user and department drives) to a DFS model in which they had a file-server with a local copy of the data in most larger sites. Since Microsoft DFS offers limited built-in monitoring, HaysMed started deploying DFS (pre-Xangati), and set up the “sites” in Active Directory. HaysMed had to rely on Wireshark packet capture tools to try and determine if the files were being served from the correct location. This was a painstaking process, especially with half a dozen file servers to monitor. By turning on NetFlow and Xangati monitoring at most of these sites, HaysMed could instantly determine whether or not file requests were being routed correctly. In addition, Haysmed was then able to monitor the DFS replication process. Without knowing what Mbps connection limit to set, HaysMed had inadvertantly been causing all sorts of issues for end-users due to DFS “micro-bursts” (too small to show up on Cacti). The problem could have taken months to resolve, but was easily identifed and remediated simply and instantly with Xangati.
Performance Management of the VDI environment Without predictive performance management, VDI environments can suffer from indeterminate performance issues negating the benefits of VDI. In order to achieve complete service assurance, VI users must be able to comprehensively track and analyze -- end-to-end -- all key infrastructure components that affect VDI end-user experience. HaysMed experienced this when performance issues began to arise as a result of their rapidly growing number of users. Xangati enabled HaysMed to watch the VDI sessions at a very granular level - right down to PCoIP session loss and latency. Based on what Xangati revealed, HaysMed was certain it didn’t have issues on the network or with the hosts or clients themselves. However, it did seem to have latency issues with PCoIP sessions proxied through a certain connection server. Sure enough, once they removed PCoIP-proxy for their internal sessions and rebuilt the connection server for external, the problems disappeared. They had spent weeks trying to uncover the issue that Xangati identified and provided remedial steps to uncover immediately.
"We expect our VDI environment to grow by about 400% this year alone, so we'll be getting our money's worth out of Xangati in the process." –
James Billinger HaysMed Systems Engineering Professional
About Xangati Xangati is a leading virtualization performance monitoring and service assurance analytics innovator serving complex virtualized data centers and hybrid cloud environments. Over 400 customers among enterprises, government agencies, healthcare organizations, educational systems and cloud managed service providers trust Xangati to gain real-time insights into the performance of their virtual machines, Web applications and virtual desktop infrastructure environments, as well as underlying network, storage and compute components. Xangati management dashboards, built on patented in-memory architecture, provide a live, continuous and interactional view into the entire IT infrastructure with predictive analytics and prescriptive remediation actions. Organizations such as Comcast, British Gas, Colliers, Harvard University and the U.S. Army, have leveraged Xangati to resolve end-user issues more quickly, optimize virtual applications, diagnose root causes of contention storms and assure overall infrastructure health. Xangati is headquartered in Silicon Valley and can be found at www.xangati.com.
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