Delivering virtual desktops in mixed environments

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

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Copyright ©2014 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright ©2014 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.

http://Dell.com/powersolutions

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.




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.



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.




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.



http://Dell.com/cloudclientcomputing

http://software.dell.com/products/vworkspace

http://qrs.ly/1t48p14

Documents

Delivering virtual desktops in mixed environments