6 Quick Tips to Overcome VDI Performance Killers

Have you been experiencing lag with your VDI? Constant lag, cursor freezes, and slow application load times are all problems that VDI users often complain about. These problems cause users inconvenience or even outright irritation and kill employee productivity.   

However, there are some practical ways to improve your VDI performance. Whether you’re an IT manager, business owner, or VDI user, this blog will provide proven strategies for optimizing your virtual desktops for faster and better performance. 

Common Issues for VDI Slow Performance  

First, let’s identify the common issues slowing down your VDI performance: 

1. Network Bottlenecks: Insufficient bandwidth or poor network segmentation causes latency and slow data transfers. 

2. Resource Overload: Overallocated CPU, RAM, or storage on servers leads to poor virtual desktop performance. 

3. Outdated Hardware: Aging servers or endpoints struggle to handle modern VDI workloads. 

4. Misconfigured VDI Settings: Improper provisioning or a lack of monitoring tools results in inefficiencies. 

6 Quick Ways to Improve VDI Performance   

1. Server Performance Monitoring  

Many new users view VDI as a “black box,” a mysterious object they understand little about and can’t look inside. While VDI solutions are sophisticated, it doesn’t mean the user experience must suffer. 

In the last few years, with the surge in demand and usage of VDI, many software manufacturers have emerged with robust monitoring tools. These tools aim to improve the end-user experience by monitoring the load on the server and its resources.

Server performance monitoring includes tracking CPU, memory, and input/output Utilization. It provides crucial data related to the total burden on a server. It relays information about peak loads.   

Ace Cloud Hosting uses this data to optimize your server environment. If the monitoring reveals a resource shortage, we either upgrade the server or deploy additional infrastructure based on the severity of the issue. This may include increasing the RAM or CPU allocation for virtual machines if the host has available capacity. 

The monitoring data also comes in handy when planning for the future. Analyze trends in resource usage to accurately forecast future needs and scale your infrastructure accordingly for consistent performance, even as demand grows.  

2. Understanding the Network   

Because of issues with the network, VDI performance is very often compromised. It can be due to mistakes in gauging bandwidth considerations or a lack of proper network segmentation.   

The network is the backbone of the virtual desktop environment, constantly active and holding up the entire infrastructure. The network is responsible for user access to the Virtual Machine. It connects to the data center and the management, monitoring, and administrative tools the network needs to function.

The network is the bond through which communication with server storage takes place, provides a secure connection with the user’s endpoint device, and, most importantly, ensures a stable and fast connection to the internet. These activities use “space” on the network.   

Proper network segmentation means separate categories of activities, such as storage traffic, VM traffic, or management traffic, are all in separate network segments. Now, management tasks don’t hinder user experience.  Adjusting network adapter settings within virtual machines can also help improve connectivity and reduce bottlenecks. 

Another step in understanding the network is monitoring the client’s network performance to reveal the bandwidth demands of each particular virtual desktop. It helps identify network bottlenecks that impact the performance of virtual machines. With this data, the network can be repurposed and the critical network segments optimized.   

It improves the network’s resilience and stability while also being flexible in terms of segmentation. Similar to server monitoring, network monitoring also illustrates trends in bandwidth usage and traffic, allowing for scheduled upgrades before performance suffers. 

3. Reducing Desktop Display Requirements  

Issues with display performance are another common complaint from virtual desktop users. Virtual desktops are different from local processors, which handle graphic tasks on the PC.  

Virtual desktops render screens on the server and then pass the relevant data back to the endpoint device for displaying the image. It’s a complicated and long-winded process, and while modern display protocols have vastly improved performance in recent years, visually intensive programs are still a heavy load on the server and the network. This adversely impacts desktop performance.   

One effective way to improve performance is by lowering display demands. For most businesses, reducing display quality will not affect productivity. However, it can make virtual desktops feel much faster and more responsive. Here are some simple ways to reduce display load: 

• Lower the screen resolution to reduce memory and bandwidth usage. 

• Avoid full-screen video playback and play videos in smaller windows to ease bandwidth constraints. 

• Disable 3D acceleration if your workloads don’t require 3D graphics, reducing unnecessary load on CPU and GPU. 

4. Using VDI-Compatible Antivirus   

Virtual servers require a different kind of antivirus. Most organizations will adopt virtualization technologies but fail to change how they deploy antivirus and malware protection.  

In a traditional physical environment, each instance of antivirus will have complete access to all the machine’s resources on which it is installed. Even in this case, users have accepted a certain amount of performance degradation.

In the case of a virtual environment, the servers share the resources of a single host, and those antivirus scans prove to be a huge resource burden when multiple scans take place at the same time using the resources of the same physical host. This causes performance and user experience to suffer terribly.  

The solution to this exists on the market in the form of a virtualization-aware antivirus. These are mature technological solutions widely used within IT organizations. Each provider can have a different approach to building intelligent antiviruses.

One solution could be to ensure that all virtual machines perform scans at different times. Another is to run the antivirus scans at the hypervisor level, eliminating the burden on the virtual machine and the user’s operating system. Adopting this approach and changing the antivirus structure on your virtual desktops will greatly enhance performance, and it is highly recommended. 

5. Partner with a Managed VDI Provider 

Managing VDI in-house can be complex and time-consuming. A hosted VDI provider takes the burden off your IT team to deliver high performance.  

Choose a reliable provider like Ace Cloud Hosting to work from any device or location without compromising performance and security. We offer 24/7 support, 99.99% uptime SLAs, and robust security features like 256-bit AES encryption and multi-factor authentication (MFA). Also, we handle updates, backups, and disaster recovery to protect your sensitive data in case of disasters and cyberattacks. 

With over 15 years of VDI expertise, our team delivers fully managed, high-performance hosted virtual desktops tailored to your business needs.  

6. Use GPUs  

Use GPUs instead of relying on emulated ones to improve VDI performance. Running virtual desktops without a physical GPU or vGPU (virtual GPU) will make them slow, unresponsive, and laggy, even if you use top-tier CPU, RAM, and all-flash storage.  

Adding a vGPU, such as an NVIDIA T4 card with Virtual PC or Virtual Workstation licensing, helps improve performance drastically. With a vGPU, users can: 

• Stream full-screen YouTube videos. 

• Attending team calls with audio and video. 

• Play games or run GPU-intensive apps directly inside the VM. 

Also Read: How GPU Acceleration Improves Virtual Desktop Performance

Best Employee Practices to Keep Your VDI Fast 

Here’s how to speed up VDI performance: 

• Close unused applications to free up memory and CPU. 

• Disable background processes that are not essential for your work. 

• Restart your VM regularly to refresh system resources. 

• Use a wired internet connection for better stability and speed. 

• Avoid streaming, downloading, or saving large files during work sessions. 

• Run disk cleanup tools weekly to maintain VM health. 

Learn how VDI can optimize the performance of your business.

Conclusion 

Even the best VDI setup can underperform if users don’t understand how to use it. Train your team in the best VDI practices. This includes properly logging out of sessions and avoiding resource-heavy background apps.

Partnering with a managed VDI provider like Ace Cloud Hosting can also deliver a secure, high-performance virtual desktop experience.   

Ready to transform your VDI setup? Contact our VDI experts at 855-223-4887 or start your 7-day free trial now.