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.

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.

Is your desktop environment becoming more and more difficult to manage? Are you worried about the security of your data on mobile devices such as laptops and smart phones? Has desktop patch and update management become a nightmare? Are you under pressure to reduce your desktop operational costs? Are you being asked to improve user’s mobility at the same time? These seemingly conflicting goals are huge challenges that IT managers face today.

How are IT managers addressing these challenges?

Virtualization. As always, VMware is leading the virtualization charge in this area as well. VMware has a suite of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) products that address each of these challenges head on. VMware View and it’s optional complimentary products (Composer & ThinApp) work with VMware’s server virtualization infrastructure (VMware ESX / vSphere / vCenter) to address these desktop security, mobility, and management issues.

How does VMware View work?

VMware View works by creating virtual desktops on robust, scalable VMware servers in the data center that provide centralized management, high availability, rapid provisioning of desktops, and instant backup/recovery, all inherited from the server virtualization infrastructure. VMware View adds to this by adding a unique feature called “linked clones” that allows admins to provision multiple desktop images from a “golden” desktop image, either manually or automatically based on policies, and compartmentalizes the base OS, application, application data, and user data into separate areas for quicker and easier desktop provisioning, patch management, and security policy control. This also saves a lot of disk storage space by using thin provisioning and deduplicating all the redundant data.

What about the desktop users?

By moving the desktop environment to the data center, you can satisfy all the security, backup, & management needs of IT administrators, but what about the desktop users? How will their experience be improved? The biggest advantages that end users gain from desktop virtualization is they can now access their desktop or a set of desktops from many different devices at work, at home, or even while traveling, all w/ optional SSL connectivity for optimal security. They can even check out their virtual desktop to their laptop to run as an image in “Offline Desktop” mode, then check back in or just resync w/ the virtual desktop the next time they are on the network. End user devices include existing desktops and laptops, thin clients and smart phones. Great strides have been made in the past couple years to make the end user virtual desktop experience as good or better than stand-alone physical desktops. You can connect local USB drives & printers and use multiple monitors w/ most thin clients today. Boot time is typically much faster than a stand-alone desktop and overall performance is typically the same or better for most users.

The Advantage of View

VMware View’s biggest advantages over competing desktop virtualization products is their ability to compartmentalize the OS, application, and data, providing the most efficient provisioning and patching procedures; minimizing the storage footprint of all the virtual desktops using thin provisioning, and/or linked clones; rapidly and automatically provisioning virtual desktops based on desktop pool profiles; providing finite control over each user’s desktop authority; offering flexibility in pushing patches to groups of users or individuals; and creating one-to-one or one-to-many user to virtual desktop relationships in either persistent or non-persistent modes. All innovative features that allow administrators maximum security and manageability of desktops, while allowing end users maximum functionality, performance, and mobility.

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

“Going green” in the data center is quite simple; reduce machines and utilize storage more efficiently by reducing disk drives. Simply by deploying VMware and virtualizing the data center it’s common to see a 90% reduction in the number of physical machines required. This means that 10 machines that exist before virtualization can be reduced down to one machine. Adding NetApp to the recipe not only allows VMware to operate at its best, but through the storage efficiencies inherent to the NetApp platform, additional savings are also provided by reducing the needed number of disk drives.

Any device in your data center that consumes power produces heat, so by reducing power consumption we naturally reduce cooling costs. Reducing one server in your data center over a year period of time will drop the amount of carbon emissions by over one ton. By reducing your server foot print you now have room to expand that didn’t exist before implementing these technologies.

Data Centers consume huge amount of electricity. Within the US alone they consume 4.5 billion kilowatt hours annually, which is 1.5% of the total US consumption. By leveraging VMware virtualization technologies combined with NetApp storage solutions, significant power within the computing cloud can be reduced, which not only adds green to our planet but also to your budget.

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

Virtualization is a key component of saving money in IT by reducing hardware, power, and cooling costs in the data center or computer room while at the same time improving server manageability and reducing downtime. As a VMware partner, Keller Schroeder specializes in helping our clients implement best practices for server virtualization using the VMware family of products. To complement our project experience, Keller Schroeder has completed additional education in order to achieve the status of VMware Enterprise Partner. We are pleased to have achieved this technical level of expertise with VMware and are enjoying a new level of partnership and collaboration with the VMware team.

Addressing Network Challenges of Virtualization

Server virtualization is a challenge to server and network administrators. As server virtualization is deployed, the edge of the network or access layer is automatically extended into the server itself as each hypervisor deployed contains one or more virtual switches. This extension not only multiplies the number of switches that need to be managed, but also moves control of the network edge from the network administrator to the server administrator. That change makes the server administrator responsible for network design, configuration, VLAN creation, application security, monitoring, and troubleshooting. Having these additional responsibilities at the server level, with visibility from the network administrator cut off, can increase the risk of accidental misconfiguration, network loop creation, security holes, and slow problem resolution in server virtualization environments. Cisco helps you address these challenges with a new network technology for server virtualization environments called Cisco VN-Link.

At the heart of Cisco VN-Link is a Cisco NX-OS feature called Port Profiles. Port Profiles are a collection of network attributes such as VLAN assignment, quality of service (QoS) metrics, access control list (ACL) configurations, and other network properties that would traditionally be applied to a given network interface. Unlike traditional network provisioning, which usually requires ports to be configured independently, Port Profiles can be deployed on a group of ports simultaneously.

Collaborative VM Deployment

In a virtual server environment, Port Profiles are distributed through API integration to each hypervisor, where they are made available to server administrators as Virtual Center Port Groups in the hypervisor’s VM management tool (VMware’s Virtual Center). To provision a new VM, the server administrator simply selects the correct Port Profile using Virtual Center and Cisco VN-Link automatically configures the network layer for proper network connectivity and policy.

With Cisco VN-Link technology, network administrators define network policy with the available network properties and server administrators select the appropriate Port Profile for the application they are deploying. Thus network administrators can provide consistent provisioning and management of the network while maintaining the server administrator’s flexibility to rapidly deploy VMs. In short, Cisco VN-Link provides you with the ability to define and deploy consistent network and security policy while preserving autonomy for the different functional groups in your organization (network, server, security, operations).

With Cisco VN-Link, network administrators have a consistent set of troubleshooting tools to quickly diagnose and resolve network-related issues in their server virtualization environments. They can also use the advanced diagnostic features of Cisco NX-OS. For example, Encapsulated Remote SPAN (ERSPAN) allows network administrators to mirror a VM’s traffic to a packet analyzer elsewhere in the network. This allows for detailed analysis of traffic between VMs inside a server, which would otherwise be invisible to the physical network. By combining basic and advanced troubleshooting tools with Cisco debugging facilities, Cisco NX-Link increases visibility into the virtual network access layer to help reduce potential application downtime. As server virtualization deployments continue to grow, server administrators face a challenging new management model and shifting technical responsibilities. The additional network-centric workload may add delays in application deployment and failure recovery. Cisco VN-Link brings the deployment and management of the network back to networking experts while at the same time creating a collaborative management model that meets the requirements server administrators to support rapid VM deployment.

Consistent Operation and Serviceability

 Conclusion

Cisco VN-Link technology is available within the Cisco Nexus product line, including the software-based Nexus 1000V and the hardware based Nexus 5000 and 7000 series switches.

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

For More Information

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

NetApp’s dedication to the principles of simplicity, innovation, and customer success has made them one of the fastest-growing storage and data management providers today.  Keller Schroeder is pleased to announce an enhanced partnership with NetApp, by becoming a Gold Partner.  The NetApp product family is a key component of Keller Schroeder’s virtualization practice by allowing our clients to provision storage as fast as servers, guaranteeing 50% less storage in a virtualized environment than other storage offerings, and allowing almost instantaneous recovery of backed up data