Liquidware Labs, a player in the desktop transformation solutions space, has announced that Stratusphere UX has been included in the Desktop Management category for the Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for its Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI). 

Stratusphere UX, which provides user-experience visibility and validation across physical, virtual and terminal session desktops, is the only performance monitoring and diagnostic solution validated by Cisco for the VXI ecosystem, which is comprised of leading virtualization technology providers.

“The validation by Cisco demonstrates the critical nature of Stratusphere UX when it comes to measuring the quality of virtual desktop environments from the perspective of the desktop user,” said Dan Libonati, Senior Solutions Architect at Presidio, which is both a Liquidware Labs Acceler8 partner and a Cisco Gold Certified partner, among other strategic alliances.  “This aspect is typically not included in traditional monitoring solutions but must be dealt with in virtual desktop implementations. Cisco is not merely recommending Stratusphere UX—they are stipulating use of this solution for those deploying their environments on the Cisco VXI stack.”

 

The full description of the Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure CVD is at https://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/ns340/ns414/ns742/ns1100/landing_vxi.html

 

Liquidware Labs Stratusphere UX is referenced under the Desktop Management Tools section as a user-experience monitoring and virtual desktop diagnostic aid that is a key component in building an end-to-end VXI system view.  

 

As described in the Cisco guidelines, Stratusphere UX “enriches the diagnostic and monitoring information available to IT administrators by correlating all performance metrics into a single pane of glass. It complements existing management solutions, particularly those associated with specific VXI subsystems like storage, hypervisor, and network management. It (Stratusphere UX) allows administrators to perform HVD monitoring and troubleshooting of user-experience issues. It also provides insight into all levels of application and user interactions—from the desktop, through the network, to the datacenter in terms of resource usage.”

 

Liquidware Labs Stratusphere UX offers several visibility and validation capabilities when assessing user experiences across physical, virtual and terminal servers:

 

• Provides metrics-to-metrics validation that the virtual desktop user experiences on VXI  meets or exceeds the physical desktop-performance baseline measured with Stratusphere FIT during  the assessment phase
• Identifies performance bottlenecks in the virtual desktop infrastructure
• Detects which VMs, users, and applications are generating resource contention such as I/O storms and overburdening CPU use, etc.
• Discovers slow network latency, network application, and protocol performance
• Pinpoints log-in delays, lagging application launch times, non-responsive applications, disk, and CPU queues
• Detects traffic from endpoints, desktops, and servers in a multi-tenancy environment with named-user and application correlation
• Identifies VM, user and application workloads: CPU/Memory/Disk/Graphics/Network—including disk IOPS and storage requirements

 

“The validation from Cisco shows, yet again, how leading virtualization industry technology providers are standardizing on Liquidware Labs solutions in their virtual desktop infrastructures,” said Liquidware Labs co-founder Tyler Rohrer.  “Cisco already relies on our Stratusphere FIT for assessments and strongly recommends assessment as an indispensable first step in planning and design.  Using Stratusphere UX to validate that virtual desktops perform as well as the physical environment makes a perfect closed loop when launching VDI.  But the true value of this solution becomes readily apparent for environments in production.  Stratusphere UX is vital to ongoing capacity planning, diagnostics, troubleshooting and management of the environment as it scales through all stages of dynamic growth.”