delivering virtual desktops in mixed environments
TRANSCRIPT
50 2014 Issue 03 | Dell.com/powersolutions
Features
Cohesive end-to-end management helps simplify large
virtual desktop deployments, optimizing scalability and
performance on diverse endpoints and platforms.
Desktop virtualization offers far-reaching business and organizational
benefits — notably, enhanced flexibility, security, data access control,
IT resource optimization and support for bring-your-own-device
(BYOD) programs. Enterprises that are heavily invested in Microsoft
technology and software licenses can gain significant cost-efficiencies by
implementing a desktop virtualization strategy based on the Microsoft®
Windows Server® 2012 Release 2 (R2) Hyper-V® hypervisor.
This approach enables IT organizations to implement flexible delivery
scenarios, such as application virtualization, remote desktop sessions
and full virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), from a single management
console. Moreover, IT leaders can help reduce per-seat cost by taking
advantage of Microsoft® Storage Spaces on Dell PowerVault direct attach
By Nicolas Cuendet
Delivering virtual desktops in mixed environments
storage (DAS) platforms — in some
cases allowing organizations to
deploy persistent virtual desktops
at a similar price point to pooled
virtual machines (VMs).
To help organizations leverage
their data center investments for
cost-effective desktop virtualization,
Dell Wyse Datacenter for Microsoft
VDI and vWorkspace provides an
integrated, end-to-end solution
designed to deliver fast and flexible
deployment of 10 to more than
35,000 virtual desktops. The desktop
virtualization solution encompasses
data center infrastructure, Microsoft
virtualization software, Dell Wyse
software, endpoints and Dell
support services.
The Dell Wyse vWorkspace
virtualization software, an optional
component of the Dell desktop
virtualization solution, enhances
and streamlines the management
of large, complex IT environments.
vWorkspace provides advanced
features not available in the native
Microsoft® Remote Desktop Services
(RDS) platform. Built upon — and
designed to fully support — the
latest Hyper-V platform and
the Microsoft® RemoteFX® display
protocol, vWorkspace adds
centralized management from Dan
iel D
avis
/In
vod
o/S
&P
scre
en
imag
es
co
urt
esy
of
Lan
dm
ark
Soft
war
e a
nd
Serv
ices
Copyright ©2014 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright ©2014 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
Dell.com/powersolutions | 2014 Issue 03 51
Broad legacy application support
Many organizations still run
business-critical applications on
older Windows platforms, such
as Windows XP, Windows 2003,
Windows Server 2008 Terminal
Services or Windows Server 2008
R2 RDSH. Other organizations use
the Linux® OS for the flexibility and
collaborative improvements inherent
in open-source software. vWorkspace
allows organizations to maintain
their legacy applications in a modern
desktop virtualization environment
with unified management through
a single console. Additionally,
these legacy applications maintain
the look and feel that end users
experience with their Windows 7 or
Windows 8.1 applications. Without
this broad support, IT administrators
would likely need to maintain
multiple environments, requiring
end users to navigate to different
places for different applications.
Such a scenario would necessitate
oversight and lead to downtime
and lost productivity.
a single console, as well as a
mix of delivery options: hosted
or local/offline VDI through
Remote Desktop Virtualization
Host (RDVH); desktop sessions
through Remote Desktop
Session Host (RDSH); and
application virtualization through
the Microsoft® Application
Virtualization (App-V) platform.
Proactive, scalable deployment
and monitoring
In relatively simple IT environments
where administrators can deploy
VDI in pools of roughly 500 seats
or fewer, RDS alone is a suitable
desktop virtualization platform.
To add more seats, administrators
can use the Microsoft® Windows
PowerShell® scripting language.
However, complex environments
may require administrators to deploy
VDI in significantly larger pools.
In this scenario, the vWorkspace
Management Console is designed
to streamline the deployment of
virtual desktops or remote sessions
on a massive scale, acting as
the control center for the entire
desktop virtualization infrastructure.
The vWorkspace Management
Console features integrated
diagnostics and monitoring, formerly
known as Foglight for Virtual
Desktops (see figure). Without
the integration of monitoring,
diagnostics and management in a
single console, correlating events
with end users and applications
for tens of thousands of seats can
be nearly impossible. However,
vWorkspace associates relevant
information in a meaningful manner,
helping simplify management.
Integrated diagnostics and monitoring in the vWorkspace Management Console make it easy
to correlate events for tens of thousands of seats.
Endpoint
Bandwidth
Latency
CPU and memory
Print servers
Hypervisor performance
To help organizations
leverage their data
center investments
for cost-effective
desktop virtualization,
Dell Wyse Datacenter
for Microsoft VDI
and vWorkspace
provides an integrated,
end-to-end solution.
Copyright ©2014 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright ©2014 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
52 2014 Issue 03 | Dell.com/powersolutions
Features
Efficient patching and maintenance
As the number of seats in a desktop
virtualization deployment increases, patching
and maintaining the environment can
become a difficult operation. Using native
tools, it may take administrators several hours
to apply application and security updates to
hundreds or even thousands of VMs. In
contrast, vWorkspace provides advanced
scheduling, automation, provisioning
and caching capabilities that enable an
organization’s IT team to deploy and update
hundreds of VMs in a matter of minutes or
service thousands of VMs in less than an hour.
This efficiency helps eliminate the need for
disruptive service outages.
vWorkspace is designed to enhance
Hyper-V with instantaneous VM replication,
provisioning and I/O optimization. These
capabilities enable administrators to make
changes, such as applying a service pack
to a VDI or RDSH master image, and then
deploy them across any number of Hyper-V
hosts — without negatively affecting the
performance of the data center infrastructure
or the experience of logged-in users.
Granular control of endpoints
and user access
As user mobility and BYOD initiatives
become pervasive, it is crucial for IT to
deliver a solid user experience while
maintaining a high level of security. The
vWorkspace Advanced Targets feature allows
IT to use granular connection policies to
deliver the right applications and virtual
desktops to approved end users or devices
based on a combination of administrator-
defined criteria. This capability lets IT grant
application access based on the end user’s
identity, location, connectivity and device
type. Additionally, a user’s computing
environment can migrate as the individual
changes location — for example, moving
through different school classrooms,
computer labs or hospital settings.
In a school scenario, students may
have access to certain courseware while
on campus, but only to an approved
subset of that courseware when logged in
remotely. A university computer lab may
be dynamically configured for different
courseware based on the day of the week,
time of day and identity of the end user. In
high-security environments, certain users,
such as contractors, may be required to
use multifactor authentication such as
Dell Defender software or RSA® SecurID®
security tokens to gain access to sensitive
applications; otherwise, they will be blocked
entirely when requesting access from an
untrusted endpoint. Advanced Targets
enables IT departments to enforce almost
any type of logic their organizations
require — based on conditions defined by
criteria such as user account, user group,
time and so forth — to provide seamless and
secure access to increasingly mobile end
users through diverse device types.
Seamless management
of multi-tenant environments
Some organizations may be required to
support untrusted environments because
of IT decentralization or mergers and
acquisitions. Others may host environments
The Dell Wyse vWorkspace
virtualization software,
an optional component
of the Dell desktop
virtualization solution,
enhances and streamlines
management of large,
complex IT environments.
Copyright ©2014 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright ©2014 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
Dell.com/powersolutions | 2014 Issue 03 53
for customers who must not communicate
with each other for security reasons. A
challenge in desktop virtualization has
been how to service end users in these
scenarios without requiring complex
security trusts and without duplicating
the brokering infrastructure for each
tenant. The vWorkspace multi-tenancy
feature enables seamless management
and application access in multi-tenant
environments, with complete isolation
using a single, centralized desktop
virtualization infrastructure. With this feature,
a customer in a hosted environment
would not be aware of or have access to
another customer’s existence, let alone its
applications or data.
Fast VM deployments
with reduced storage costs
In-memory caching on the virtualization
host server is another advantage of the
vWorkspace architecture. This vWorkspace
technology, called HyperCache, enables
the Hyper-V host server to cache frequently
accessed data, such as the golden image
of the OS, in RAM. This memory-based
approach helps prevent resource contention
associated with boot storms and latency
since the most regularly accessed elements
are stored in-memory for quicker access.
Once the IT administrator has created a
template VM and finalized the master VM,
vWorkspace reads the block sizes of the
virtual hard disk. By monitoring which blocks
are constantly being accessed, HyperCache
can cache those blocks in RAM and
distribute them from memory rather than
from disk-based storage. HyperCache also
reduces the I/Os-per-second (IOPS) load
required within the desktop deployment.
This efficiency allows HyperCache to
leverage low-cost DAS or local disks instead
of relatively more complex and expensive
storage area network (SAN) space.
Another vWorkspace feature, called
HyperDeploy, allows almost instant
provisioning of virtual desktops, including
persistent desktops. VMs are created at the
same time the golden image is being copied
on the server or servers, enabling disk space
savings of up to 40 percent.
Strong support for Linux VMs
and mixed environments
When organizations must support Linux
workloads alongside Windows VMs — during
software development, for instance —
vWorkspace is currently one of the only
enterprise desktop virtualization applications
providing basic support for x64 and x86
Linux distributions, such as the CentOS™,
Debian®, Red Hat® Linux and Ubuntu®
operating systems. Using vWorkspace,
administrators can perform provisioning,
brokering and a range of simple power
management functions on Linux virtual
desktops, based on xrdp connectivity, an
open-source Remote Desktop Protocol
(RDP) stack for Linux. In addition, Dell offers
the Wyse 3050-T50, Wyse 5250-D50D and
Wyse 7250-Z50D thin clients as well as
the Wyse 7452-X50m mobile thin client,
all based on Wyse-enhanced Linux.
Overlapping software tools are not
required since the vWorkspace platform
supports mixed VM OS and hypervisor
vWorkspace allows
organizations to maintain
their legacy applications
in a modern desktop
virtualization environment
with unified management
through a single console.
Copyright ©2014 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright ©2014 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
54 2014 Issue 03 | Dell.com/powersolutions
Features
environments. To help simplify IT
management tasks, administrators can
import Hyper-V, the Microsoft® System
Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)
tool, the VMware vSphere® virtualization
platform and the Parallels® Virtuozzo™
Containers OS virtualization software into a
single vWorkspace Management Console.
Wide-ranging device support
Support for a wide range of endpoints
makes vWorkspace well suited for BYOD.
Access to virtual desktops is enabled by
complimentary vWorkspace Connector
software that is installed on the endpoint
device. vWorkspace Connectors are
available for Windows, Apple® iOS, Mac OS®,
Google® Android™, Oracle® Java®, Linux and
vWorkspace ThinShell platforms.
vWorkspace is designed to run natively
on RemoteFX, which the vWorkspace team
has enhanced by expanding RDP support for
audio, graphics, multimedia, multi-monitoring,
print and USB on a wide area network (WAN).
vWorkspace also includes enhancements
such as Adobe® Flash® redirection, multimedia
redirection and bidirectional audio.
IT groups can virtualize the Microsoft®
Lync® 2013 unified communications
platform for vWorkspace virtual desktops,
enabling end users to continue experiencing
high-quality integrated voice, web and video
conferencing. vWorkspace also allows end
users to run voice applications over LAN
and WAN, even over high-latency and
low-bandwidth connections. Finally,
vWorkspace supports end-to-end universal
printing for VDI and RDSH, avoiding the need
for a third-party application.
Flexible experience
Dell has integrated vWorkspace with
Windows Server 2012 R2 to leverage the
secure, scalable and high-performing
Microsoft platforms that are core to the
Dell Wyse Datacenter for Microsoft VDI
and vWorkspace desktop virtualization
solution: Hyper-V hypervisor, RemoteFX
display protocol and App-V application
virtualization. Using vWorkspace,
organizations can deploy a blended model
of VDI, RDSH and application virtualization
tailored to user requirements. With
enhanced management and performance
features built around the Microsoft
VDI platform, vWorkspace provides IT
organizations with the flexibility to address
whatever changes come their way.
Author
Nicolas Cuendet is the Dell cloud client-computing
solutions senior marketing manager.
Learn More
Dell Cloud Client-Computing:
Dell.com/cloudclientcomputing
Dell Wyse vWorkspace:
software.dell.com/products/vworkspace
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V:
qrs.ly/1t48p14
Dell, Defender, Foglight, PowerVault, vWorkspace and Wyse are trademarks of Dell Inc.
With enhanced
management and
performance features
built around the Microsoft
VDI platform, vWorkspace
provides IT organizations
with the flexibility to
address whatever changes
come their way.
Copyright ©2014 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright ©2014 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.