Many organizations are actively migrating from traditional VDI solutions like Citrix or Omnissa to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) to mitigate rising costs and leverage cloud benefits, despite inherent concerns about performance, cost management, and migration efficiency.
Key barriers to AVD adoption include ensuring equivalent performance to established VDI environments, accurately forecasting and optimizing consumption-based AVD costs, and achieving a fast, data-driven migration process.
ControlUp addresses these challenges by providing pre-migration baselining, real-time performance monitoring, and cost optimization for AVD environments through its DaaS IQ and AI platform.
Utilizing ControlUp, organizations can achieve significant AVD infrastructure cost savings (60-70%), accelerate deployment from weeks to hours, and confidently manage their AVD environments for optimal digital employee experience post-migration.
Many IT teams are reeling from price increases in their Citrix and Omnissa environments and are actively exploring what comes next. For a growing number, that answer is shifting to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD).
The case for AVD is clear enough, but the path there is another matter.
With decades of tuned performance and institutional knowledge baked into IT infrastructure, migrating to AVD seems daunting.
Going from traditional VDI to AVD is a lot like transitioning from a gas-powered to an electric car. Few doubt the tech’s validity, but there’s a lot more involved than swapping out an engine. Maintenance is different. User habits have to change. You even have to figure out how and where you’ll get your fuel.
Similarly, with the switch from Citrix or Omnissa to AVD, it’s not about whether AVD can get the job done. The concern hovers around the journey and whether the experience on the other side will be just as good. For teams needing to measure digital employee experience in AVD, these considerations are paramount.
Why the Market Is Moving to AVD
Even organizations that have been running on-prem VDI for 15 or 20 years are rethinking the ROI. When licensing costs climb, the math changes… and AVD offers a compelling alternative.
AVD also gives you native integration with the Microsoft suite, including 365. And it’s easy to scale the number of users and the virtual desktops they use.
For these reasons, the transition from Citrix or Omnissa to AVD isn’t a fringe decision. Thousands of enterprises are having the same discussion. But companies have to overcome some barriers as they consider adopting AVD.
3 Barriers Holding Organizations Back
Ginni Rometty, the first female President and CEO of IBM, observed, “Growth and comfort do not coexist.” As organizations try to “grow” into the AVD experience, many find the following three barriers more than a little uncomfortable, so they’re worth naming plainly.
1. Will it perform well?
Traditional VDI solutions have had 20 years to fine-tune their products. And organizations have had just as long to get used to them. IT teams need confidence that end users won’t suffer. In the absence of a unified management platform for AVD and W365, teams worry about:
- Sizing. Your setup must do a good job of supporting your teams, without overpaying.
- AVD license optimization. AVD has cost-saving features that can drastically reduce your expenses, such as autoscaling, but your configurations must be correct.
- Ongoing AVD monitoring. As needs change, you have to know whether you need a different AVD optimization strategy, and real-time monitoring is the only way to get this data.
In addition to filling these gaps, teams must also consider the actual price of AVD.
2. What will AVD actually cost?
On-prem VDI feels familiar. True, your setup costs may have been high, especially if you had to purchase new hardware, but after that, you may have slipped into a pricing comfort zone, even if the price became steep.
AVD pricing is different. It’s based on consumption, variable storage and networking costs, and session host expenses. Without a clear cost comparison, decision-makers get stuck in a holding pattern.
3. How long will it take, and can we speed it up?
If you migrate one department at a time, you risk organizational misalignment. But you still have to validate each migration phase before moving on to the next. This takes data. And if you don’t have dependable migration data, confidence naturally stalls, along with the migration.
How ControlUp Addresses All Three: Performance, Cost, and Speed
With ControlUp, you can establish a detailed performance baseline well before you jump into your migration.
ControlUp can collect usage data from your existing Citrix or Omnissa environments. Then your IT team can use this data to size the AVD deployment. By eliminating the guesswork, ControlUp can significantly reduce AVD deployment time.
For example, analytics may tell you that Sales uses far fewer resources than marketing. This means you can deploy smaller, less expensive sessions in AVD, eliminating challenges in managing multiple AVD host pools. When you have a proactive AVD session host monitoring and repair system, it’s easy to see how to reduce AVD costs.
And once you’ve crossed the migration finish line, ControlUp gives you real-time visibility into how teams use your AVD resources, the latency impacting each session, when users log in, and how responsive the application is. With this data, you can assess the performance of each migration, make adjustments if needed, and then move on to the next phase.
The ControlUp ONE Platform + DaaS IQ
When considering how to improve AVD performance, the ControlUp ONE/DaaS IQ combination is worth a look. ControlUp ONE is an AI platform built on deep DEX capabilities. It provides real-time monitoring, management, and troubleshooting across your digital workplace, including AVD environments, with performance insights into session host health and end-user satisfaction in AVD.
DaaS IQ is a specialized cost optimization layer that automates scaling decisions and de-provisions idle resources.
Combined, ControlUp ONE and DaaS IQ give IT teams a full picture of the migration plus ongoing AVD management for enterprises. For this reason, many feel ControlUp provides the best AVD management platform.
Understanding and Optimizing AVD Costs
ControlUp provides IT teams with a cost analysis layer. This tells you what AVD will cost compared to your current setup.
But it gives you more than theoretical modeling. DaaS IQ actively optimizes your live AVD environment. If a desktop is idle, for instance, it gets turned off. Or if a session host is using too many resources, DaaS IQ can right-size it.
With these features, customers can expect savings of 60-70% on AVD infrastructure.
Phasing and Accelerating Your Migration
ControlUp’s data-driven migration optimization lets you migrate one department, evaluate its success, and then move on to the next. This means you don’t have to depend on gut feelings. You get the data you need and can quickly move on without hesitation or uncertainty. In this way, you can reduce AVD deployment time from weeks to hours.
Migrate to AVD with Confidence
Remember that gas-to-electric analogy? Here’s the punchline: people who make the switch don’t end up missing their old car. They’re too busy enjoying the ride.
It’s the same with moving to AVD. Organizations that use ControlUp can baseline, migrate, and then enjoy AVD performance tuning and optimization. With ControlUp’s AVD management tools, they get an IT “vehicle” that runs laps around their legacy setup, at a fraction of the cost.
Request a demo to see firsthand how ControlUp solves your challenges in real time.
