How to represent VDIs in CSDM

[Mike Foreman]

We access VDIs via Azure authentication but I'm wondering if there are any examples or suggestions for how to represent VDIs in the CSDM?

[Mathew Hillyard]

Hi Mike,

What applications provide the VDI infrastructure? These are the business applications

What environments of those applications exist (dev/test/prod) in what geographical locations? These are the application services.

What infrastructure supports those environments? These are the configuration items.

As for the actual instantiations of virtual desktops, you could treat these in the same way as regular desktop support services (they're just virtual rather than physical), perhaps via Dynamic CI Groups with a sideways link (not represented in the CSDM 4 standard) to a Business Service Offering (or a Technical Service Offering if your desktop support services sit under Technical Portfolio). You could also link the instances back to the relevant environment of the Application Services or infra that host them.

If any platforms support any of these applications, then you can either make the Business Application a Platform Application and select a Platform Host, or use Digital Integration Management to create and associate interfaces between Business Applications.

The CSDM Data Model Examples doc contains a Client Compute example on slide 59, which whilst not the same as VDI is a decent starting point. I haven't seen any specific modelling examples for VDI infra to date.

I hope this helps!
Mat