Nerdio Manager for Enterprise

What is Nerdio Manager for Enterprise?

Nerdio Manager for Enterprise, (let’s just call it Nerdio), extends the native Azure Virtual Desktop (previously named Windows Virtual Desktop) admin experience with best-in-class enterprise capabilities, empowering IT professionals to automate, optimize, and secure AVD deployments with ease.

Nerdio extends the native admin experience capabilities of Azure Virtual Desktop, while allowing customers to leverage the significant investments Microsoft is making into the AVD service. Unlike other virtual desktop solutions, Nerdio does not replace Microsoft’s native components but enhances them with best-in-class enterprise capabilities.

Why use Nerdio? An EUC specialist’s opinion

AVD is without doubt a great virtual desktop platform and with AVD, Microsoft have really taken the lessons learned over the last 20 years of desktop virtualisation and made sure not to make the same mistake again. Historically, they have lost market share to the likes of Citrix and VMware who have each touted their own award-winning desktop virtualisation platforms that have excelled and made the Microsoft offerings look very much like the poor cousin.

Now though, AVD has really brought out an offering that is not only feature rich, boasts features that the other vendors can’t support or supply (Windows 10 multi-session for example), add to this that logically the AVD desktops sit logically ‘local’ to the O365 suite of software that is being adopted by organisations every day and Microsoft have finally taken their rightful place at the top of the virtual desktop pile.

The slight problem with AVD

But as an architect and administrator of VMware Horizon for the last 7 years there is, in the authors opinion one area that AVD falls down slightly, the management plane. Is it functional? Yes, is it logical? Yes. Is it unnecessarily labor-intensive to manage and monitor virtual desktops as an administrator on a day-to-day basis? Yes.

Compared to products like VMware Horizon that have evolved over the last decade to be the paradigms of ease of use and efficiency behind-the-scenes, AVD falls short. Tasks that would take a software installation followed by 3 or 4 mouse clicks to update a desktop image in for all users in VMware Horizon take dozens of clicks in AVD, nor is the update process intuitive, yes you will get used to it, but it’s overly complex.

Where Nerdio comes in

On the face of it Nerdio makes the day-to-day administration tasks of AVD much easier by putting everything you need in one place, accessible via a few mouse clicks and in an intuitive manner, so if that was all it does it would be a huge improvement.

But there is more, Nerdio was originally designed as a tool to make automation in Azure easier primarily via the use of PowerShell scripting and an interface that simplified the task of creating scripts that using Azure alone can be quite daunting unless you are an expert, in doing so it opened up the features of Azure that are ‘under the hood’ and not accessible via the GUI. With the release of AVD, or WVD as it was then, the application of the existing Nerdio technology to go above and beyond its original remit became clear and the Nerdio I know (and have grown to love) today was born.

So what sorts of things can we do with Nerdio?

Automate and simplify the process of updating AVD images, using the Nerdio image building and refresh automation the labor-intensive aspects of desktop image management and updates in AVD cease to be as labor-intensive and complex because Nerdio will do all the provisioning for you.

Leverage the scaling automation of Nerdio, dynamically increase and decrease the number of desktops that are deployed in Azure – e.g. scaling down is useful overnight when the environment is not in use, Nerdio will remove all the deployed desktops so that you are not paying for them, Azure can do this but it’s only accessible via scripts that must be written and implemented adding complexity to your environment.

The other side of scaling is the ability Nerdio has to monitor the AVD desktops themselves. If it detects that user numbers or server workloads are increasing, it will automatically provision additional servers before the users get affected by performance problems due to overloading. With AVD alone you would likely be receiving service desk tickets from users complaining about bad performance and you would need to troubleshoot and manually increase the number of hosts in the environment – you may also then need to adjust the automation scripts if you had implemented them.

Summary

There are dozens of other features that also ease the burden and overhead for administrators but the scaling automation of Nerdio on its own is justification for most customers, by removing the unused aspects of your AVD deployment overnight, Nerdio saves you money in Azure costs that customers typically end up paying because the complexities of automating it themselves without Nerdio elude them, ultimately they do not get successfully implemented and the customer pays for virtual desktop infrastructure that is sat largely unused for 14 hours a day.

A less tangible but not inconsequential cost saving is in your own manpower, how frequently desktop images need to be refreshed vary, but typically a refresh occurs at least once every fortnight and usually takes an administrator most of a day to complete the work, Nerdio would likely reduce that time down to a couple of hours – and make the process repeatable in the other Azure regions rather than administrators of those environments having to spend another day doing the same work again.

ComputerWorld and Nerdio

Some customers have expressed concerns over having another product in the AVD solution stack, their concern being that an issue results in vendors finger pointing at one another instead of getting on and fixing the problem.

Customer care is one of ComputerWorld’s highest priorities, experience has taught us that a key component in delivering excellent customer support is for us to have strong relationships with our partners and vendors, such that, in the unlikely event there is a problem, we are able to easily put the customer in touch with someone that will fix the problem and not pass the buck.

Via our partnerships with both Nerdio and our distributers we have direct lines of communication both with Microsoft and Nerdio themselves to ensure swift and effective resolution should issues arise.

If you would like to speak to a ComputerWorld specialist about how Nerdio can help your business, complete the form below.