VMware View Desktop Virtualization

Part II: Improving the User Experience

In a previous newsletter, we discussed VMware View desktop virtualization software and it’s benefits. VMware has released the latest version of this software, called View 4, which helps lower the cost of desktop virtualization and simplifies the management capabilities, but perhaps most importantly, improves the desktop user experience.

The biggest new feature is a brand new graphics protocol called PCoIP, which radically improves the performance of virtual desktops to provide the richest user experience yet. It was designed specifically for desktop virtualization, and is optimized to run over wide area and high latency networks. It provides the fastest screen refresh rate for remote desktop displays, squeezing out any lag time that may have existed before with the RDP protocol. High end graphics and CAD users used to be excluded as desktop virtualization candidates, but with PCoIP and VMware View 4, that is no longer the case.

A wide range of vendors are throwing their support behind desktop virtualization now too, including Cisco, Dell, IBM, HP & Wyse. Some exciting new products being offered are zero client devices, which are OS-less thin clients that provide a very low power, no moving parts, hardware chip that provides a VMware View client using the new PCoIP graphics protocol for the best possible virtual desktop performance. These devices typically allow up to four independent monitors, with different high resolution and placement capabilities, plus local USB connections and speaker ports.

VMware View 4 also adds support for vSphere 4, which is the latest and greatest version of VMware’s server virtualization software that provides even better performance than it’s VI3 predecessor. vSphere 4 adds even more scalability too, allowing up to 1000 desktops per server and up to 10,000 desktops under a single management server. These and many other new features provide the leading Enterprise virtualization platform for desktops and servers alike.

With these latest improvements, especially around the user experience, desktop virtualization is definitely on its way to becoming main stream, and just like with server virtualization, VMware is leading the way in making that a reality.

Contact your Keller Schroeder Senior Account Manager to learn more or discuss the benefits of implementing Virtualized Desktops within your environment.

Accelerating the Distributed Network

As the work environments of organizations and employees become more distributed, the productivity of users in branch and remote offices becomes increasingly important to the success of the business as a whole. All users need fast, secure access to critical applications from wherever they are working; at headquarters, in branch offices or when traveling. Contradictory to this, for ease of management, enhanced security and compliance, the current trend is to consolidate applications and servers, physically or through virtualization, to fewer, centralized locations,. This simplifies server and application administration but can create performance problems for distributed users. In some cases, a centralized application results in a poorly performing application.

Why?

The problem is latency (the delay in responsiveness between systems); another measurement of a network that isn’t often talked about by telecoms and ISPs. That’s because it’s largely outside of their control. Beyond buying the fastest routers or laying more direct cable between locations, there is an inescapable fact: the speed of light. It takes 150ms – about 1/8th of a second – to go over a network from New York to Tokyo when the conditions are right. That doesn’t seem very long, but it’s over 100 times longer than the wait on a Local Area Network (LAN). That turns out to be important, as LAN application best-practice is to use thousands or tens of thousands round trips of small packets for every action. Even 1/8th of a second can add up to a significant delay when thousands of round trips are needed. What was fine at low latency (over the LAN), is often impossible at WAN latencies.

Unaware of this problem, your employees still want to use LAN applications everywhere. They’re lightweight, flexible and easy for them to use – which results in higher productivity and lower support costs. On a LAN, they’re also fast. Ideally, there would be a way to enjoy LAN applications everywhere, regardless of the latency factor.

Of course, we can’t ignore the impact of bandwidth completely. Applications such as email and file shares are now joined on the WAN by a new set of time-sensitive applications, such as Voice and Video. Accommodating those on the WAN, alongside the existing traffic, requires a way to address not only the inherent latency, but also manage bandwidth. The right user needs to access the right application without having to over-buy bandwidth for peak loads or frivolous traffic.

Bluecoat‘s WAN Optimization Solutions accelerate performance to remote users to LAN-like speeds. In addition, policy based controls triage the use of network resources by matching users, applications and content with responsible use policies and your priorities.

The following are business benefits of a WAN Optimization project:

• Use the Internet instead of expensive private WAN links
• Reduce costs by delaying the purchase of additional bandwidth
• Enable key IT mandates, such as server consolidation, outsourcing and SOA
• Remove redundant and inappropriate traffic to ensure availability at peak times
• Increased user productivity by faster delivery of applications and data to remote users

Bluecoat’s WAN Optimization Solutions are appliances to be deployed in the remote and headquarters offices. These appliances improve performance in several ways. By deploying WAN Optimization across the network, organizations can improve user performance while reducing costs. Server storage or consolidation can be centralized into the datacenter to reduce administrative expenses without negatively impacting the end user experience. WAN costs can be contained and possibly reduced as duplicate data is removed from the WAN connections. Branch users can become more productive no longer having to wait for applications and data.

Contact your Keller Schroeder Senior Account Manager to learn more, see a demonstration, or discuss the benefits of implementing the Bluecoat WAN Optimization Solutions within your environment.

Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX)

Do you use the telephone to communicate with your customers? If you said “Why, Yes we do!” then Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) can help you deliver superior customer service.

“How can we do this?” you might ask.

We can answer that in two words, “Call Flow”…

Specifically, the Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) system allows for complete customization of call flow. Applying techniques such as “Skills Based Routing” and “Call Queues” we can get your customer to the right person the first time. A call can be routed based on the time of day, the dialed number, or from an interactive selection made by the caller themselves.

If your customer does need to wait to reach an employee they can listen to pre-recorded information about your business, information regarding their hold time, or even a selection of music. If you would like to gather information about your caller, the system can be configured to prompt and collect that information from them and make it available to your employee when they answer that call. If your business application allows, the system can even “pop-up” customer information preparing the employee with information about the caller before the call is answered.

The reference to a “Call Center” often conjures up images of enormous rooms, spanning for miles, full of people at small desks taking calls. While those environments do exist and often exemplify the various needs for managing the call flow of customer calls, don’t let size fool you. Cisco’s UCCX product is not just for large businesses with large call centers. It can be used to improve efficiency, boost productivity, and enhance responsiveness in businesses, departments, and branches of all shapes and sizes.

With a little internal investigation, most businesses will find they have a group of employees (ranging anywhere from 2 to 200) that manage incoming phone calls from multiple phone lines, often using multiple line appearances on their phones, and currently juggle those exponential combinations by hand. If this sounds like a group within your business, we have news for you. You already have a “Call Center” in place, it’s simply being managed manually and although those individuals likely do a fantastic job of juggling all those callers, this situation can often result in a stressful and inefficient environment for both the employees and your customers.

Cisco’s UCCX product allows you to consolidate multiple line appearances on a phone into only one for each employee to manage. If your business has multiple numbers, they can be directed to a variety of “call queues” all represented by one line appearance on the phone. Rather than managing multiple calls and placing callers on hold, the system can do this for you. Employees can manage one line appearance (reducing their stress level) and be provided caller information on the Cisco Agent Desktop. This information can include caller id, dialed number, and information collected from the caller.

Not to worry, there’s something for the supervisors and managers as well. This system can provide them with real time call information, historical data and other advanced supervisory features. A supervisor can monitor live calls, barge in, or intercept calls to ensure a high quality level of service for your customers. Historical data allows you to track trends and help forecast the staffing needs, even by skill-set.

For more information or to see a demonstration of Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Express please contact your Keller Schroeder Senior Account Manager.

Keller Schroeder, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, is now a certified Microsoft Dynamics CRM partner. For more information about Dynamics CRM and our practice, see our Dynamics CRM page.

For several years, many have made use of the Cisco VPN Client as the standard of connecting to their business networks for application and system access. Although the traditional Cisco VPN Client has been extended to support the recent Microsoft Windows 7 release, support for the 64-bit architecture is not planned. For those devices, the Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client is required.

Since the Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client makes use of the SSL Protocol (unlike the Cisco VPN Client that uses IPSEC), specific licensing changes may be required for the appliance you’re terminating the VPN sessions on.

The Cisco ASA5500

This series originally required an additional SSL License Pack for each and every simultaneous user to be connected via SSL (AnyConnect VPN Client or WebVPN portal); however, with the recent changes in OS version 8.2 (pdf), you can acquire the licenses needed for your Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client users less expensively depending upon the type of access you wish to grant them.

The descriptions of the two predominant licensing models for the Cisco ASA5500 appliance are described as follows (from the Cisco website):

Cisco AnyConnect Essentials: This feature offers basic AnyConnect tunneling support for customers who require VPN remote access but do not need Cisco Secure Desktop features or clientless SSL VPN capabilities. AnyConnect Essentials supports mobile connectivity options with the AnyConnect Mobile license. Upgrade to the full-featured AnyConnect Premium license (traditional AnyConnect) is available by applying a traditional AnyConnect license or shared license to the ASA appliance.

Cisco AnyConnect Premium: Includes clientless SSL VPN and Cisco Secure Desktop capabilities (including Host Scan). Optionally provides Full Tunneling access to Enterprise applications. License is based on number of simultaneous users and is available as a single device or shared license.

The online documentation for the Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client is available for your review.

Consider these:

Each of the above can be addressed by implementing solutions utilizing the efficiencies of Storage Virtualization techniques and technologies. The first step is a Storage Assessment, performed by Keller Schroeder engineers, to discover the potential within your environment and where Virtualization can provide the biggest benefit.

About that Response Time:

Do your applications seem slower than before? Are end users complaining of slow systems? If so, have you considered the storage component of the equation when looking for solutions?

In today’s complex IT environments, there are numerous integral components required to deliver the speed demanded by your end users to perform their jobs efficiently and effectively. In the event of slowing applications, giving attention to only the most obvious components such as network bandwidth and server processing power isn’t always enough to give relief to the underlying issue. It’s vital to realize that the access to your data storage is also a critical component of the overall IT infrastructure performance.

Just as Server Virtualization technologies such as VMware can facilitate a growing Data Center’s needs and provide cost saving initiatives, Storage Virtualization is also a vital part of that recipe and provides its own benefits to your environment.

If any or all of the items mentioned above appeal to you or your business, contact your Keller Schroeder Senior Account Manager to learn more, schedule a Storage Assessment, or just discuss how our experienced engineers can help you get started with a solution for your environment.

Are you using Microsoft Exchange for email and productivity collaboration? If not, you might want to take a look. According to the RadiCati Group [doc], in 2009, there have been 280 billion emails sent every day. Thanks to great SPAM filtering products like Barracuda and IronPort, however, most of those messages don’t reach your inbox. For the messages that do, Microsoft Exchange is a great place to house them for better management, sharing and security. Exchange commands 57% of the corporate messaging software market demonstrating a strong showing in email and productivity collaboration tools.

Microsoft has released numerous versions of Exchange since its inception in 1996. Today, many companies host Exchange 2007 which incorporated significant changes from Exchange 2003 such as a 64 bit architecture for increased RAM utilization, the introduction of multiple roles (allowing an administrator to separate out all functionality of the system into various physical servers or virtual servers for greater load manageability), greatly improved high availability/redundancy features that can withstand an entire server failure with zero impact on the end users, an introduction of Unified Messaging integrating voicemail with your mailbox, and a multitude of other enhancements. It was a complete redesign of Exchange 2003 and, from our experience, a vastly superior product. For more information, you can visit Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2007 Product Overview site.

If you prefer being at the leading edge of technology, Exchange 2010 was just Released to Manufacturing (RTM) by Microsoft on October 8th, which means Microsoft has officially signed off on the new code and it will soon be available to the public for purchase and installation. New features of Exchange 2010 include Role-Based Access Control Permissions providing an administrator more granular control of permissions, new Exchange Management Console features, integration with Active Directory Rights Management Service, new transport and routing functionality along with many enhancements for Outlook Web Access (OWA) resulting in an interface more closely resembling the standard Microsoft Outlook client. For a complete list of the new features and enhancements please visit the Microsoft Exchange 2010 website for more information.

Microsoft has continued to improve each new release of Exchange Server, meeting the challenges of the ever-changing infrastructure and addressing end-user requests and needs. With the many user experience enhancements in addition to Administrator benefits Microsoft has implemented, it is easy to see why Exchange is so prevalent and commands such a strong share of the messaging market.

Contact your Keller Schroeder Senior Account Manager to learn more or discuss the benefits of implementing this Microsoft Exchange 2007 or 2010 within your environment.

As you continue to review and improve your voice infrastructure, the time to update your Cisco Unity voice messaging system has arrived. Back in early 2008, Cisco announced End of Support (EOS) for version 4.x of Cisco Unity products. The most recent version – Cisco Unity version 7.x – is available to Unity 4.x customers with specific support agreements (contact your Sr. Account Manager for details).

Unity’s remaining product lifecycle is detailed in the table below:

Those currently utilizing the Cisco Unity version 4.x may want to visit the official announcement that lists each of the product part numbers affected by the original announcement:

A few additional links you might find of interest:

Lotus Notes and Domino Version 8.5.1 was released for download on October 12th and adds to the already impressive array of new features that have been introduced since version 8 was released in August 2007.

Several new features have been added that users have been asking for. Some of the most requested Client features include in-line spell check, capturing Recent Contacts for repeated use, Immediate Out of Office notifications, and Federated Calendars (display additional calendars at once) which include internal as well as external calendars such as Google Calendars and iCal Feeds. The calendar can also display invitations that haven’t been accepted yet as ghosted entries.

The iNotes client (web access) has been greatly improved where it’s difficult to tell the difference between it and the actual Notes client. In addition, now there is an option to automatically sync the local contacts with the iNotes contacts. Response time has been greatly improved and new display modes have been introduced such as Lite Mode for slower connection speeds and UltraLite mode for the iPhone.

Traveler was introduced in 8.5 and recently enhanced in 8.5.1. The new enhancement lets you run a free Traveler client on your Windows Mobile Phone or iPhone that connects back to a Lotus Traveler server you setup at your own location. Traveler lets you sync your mail, calendar, and contacts over the air with just a personal data plan from your cell phone carrier.

On the Server side, new compression and attachment storage features have been introduced that will let your organization save 40 to 60% on server disk utilization. In addition to potential disk savings, upgrading to Domino 8 can reduce CPU and I/O utilizations on most platforms.

On the Management side, the new ID Vault can be implemented to allow users to automatically recover damaged, lost, forgotten id files and administrators can reset individual passwords as easily as they would a Windows password. And as of 8.5.1, the Domino Developer client is now available for free without the need for an additional license.

For additional information on these and many more new features, please refer to these articles on the IBM website:

Contact your Keller Schroeder Senior Account Manager to learn more or discuss the benefits of implementing the Lotus Domino upgrade within your environment.

Keller Schroeder’s annual Client Appreciation Event was once again a dual success – an opportunity to say thank you to our clients, and an opportunity to make a positive impact on our community.  This year’s event (held on October 2^nd) sported a Hawaiian theme and included good music, abundant food, and great conversation between Keller Schroeder employee-owners and over 250 client attendees. 

Attendees were asked to join Keller Schroeder in bringing food items that could be donated to the Tri-State Food Bank for the event.  In all, over 2000 dry food and produce items were collected and donated by Keller Schroeder employee-owners and clients.  In addition, Keller Schroeder partnered with Marx Barbeque to donate 500 lbs of fresh meat to the Food Bank.

Keller Schroeder’s strong relationships with key vendors were on display, as the event was supported and attended by Cisco, NetApp, LifeSize Video, and IronPort.