In the realm of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) management, reduction in administrative efforts of IT teams and turnaround time for change management are paramount. Using Accops’ web interface, VDI admins can perform actions such as VM provisioning, recompose and power operations on the VMs. However, most of the provisioning and recompose operations are scheduled in off-peak hours to ensure no disruption to live users, resulting in IT admins burning the midnight oil to complete such tasks. With the addition of a task scheduler, IT admins are now empowered to schedule the VM provisioning-related tasks to be performed at the desired time.
Unlike physical desktops, VDI enables quick change management and capacity buildup. IT admins can create a pool of virtual machines (Desktop Virtual Machines, DVM) to be used by users as virtual desktops, DVMs can be added or removed from pools anytime based on requirements. For patching these DVMs or adding any application, the pool can be recomposed with a new gold master image. Currently, the admins need to perform these actions online. As these operations cause disruption in user work, these operations are scheduled after office hours, weekends and in many cases, late night when all users have logged off. Certain organizations do very frequent application upgrades in the gold master and hence frequent recompose operations, causing IT admins to spend extra hours at work.
The latest addition to Accops HyWorks is a task scheduler that can execute specific tasks at a given time. With this feature, IT admins can create a task with the required configuration for operations like provisioning of new pools or recompose of existing pools with a new gold master and then schedule the task to be executed unattended on a specific day of the week and at a specific time. If there are active user sessions at the scheduled time period, the system can take the desired action of waiting for the users to logout or forcefully terminate the user sessions after showing a time-bound warning message within the user sessions.
There are new services introduced in the HyWorks controller for the feature to work named Scheduler and Action Processor. When an admin creates a task, a job is created with all configuration inputs and stored in the HyWorks database and added to a queue. The newly added scheduler service keeps a tab on time and all created tasks. At the right time, it initiates Action Processor which will perform the required action based on the configuration available in the database for the task.
Logged-in users are shown notifications about the scheduled operation and are advised to logout by giving a wait timer for configured minutes. With this feature, the following operations can be scheduled:
· Provisioning of a new pool
· Recompose of a pool
· Restart of VMs in a pool
The feature works for both shared hosted desktop and personal desktop pools. Only Windows OS-based pools are supported for now and support for Linux-based pools will be released soon.
The additional automation that this feature provides, will enable HyWorks administrators to have more time at hand to do strategic tasks as well have a better work-life balance.
(Note: The feature is currently available as a limited release and will be part of the upcoming GA release.)