It’s already autumn, and many employees who six months ago left to work remotely “for a month” were surprised to find that the company's management refused to rent a significant part of the office space, directing the freed up funds to accelerate the process of digital business transformation. And we can only admit that the imperceptible transformation of temporary quarantine measures into a new reality has taken place.
"According to the survey Gartner 2020 the Digital the Workplace the Survey , 68% of respondents agree that after COVID-19 senior managers pay close attention to the VDI-class solutions, - said a leading analyst of virtual platforms and vice-president at Gartner Matt Cain ( Matt Cain ) ... “The pandemic quickly changed the status of many desktop virtualization technologies, collaboration software, enterprise chat platforms, and Desktop as a Service, from useful to absolutely must.
In other words, company employees continue to get used to working from home, realizing that this is no longer a sprint, but a marathon. At this time, specialists serving the corporate IT infrastructure choose and implement VDI (Virtualization Desktop Infrastructure) management systems, trying to reproduce as fully as possible in a virtual environment all the tools of a familiar physical office.
There are several solutions of this class on the market, but one of the most versatile and flexible today is an almost win-win combination of VMware Horizon, VMware Workspace ONE and VMware vSAN .
VMware Horizon
VMware's virtual desktop management platform allows remote workers to fully perform their duties from a home desktop, laptop or netbook, tablet, thin client and zero client solutions.
Probably, there is no need to describe in detail the advantages of this approach, so we will simply list them: reduced costs for maintaining IT infrastructure, increased security, new scenarios of work, minimization of downtime.
An important advantage of Horizon- this is the ability to create "hybrid" working environments, which may be necessary if, to perform their tasks, some of the employees used devices with specific capabilities, for example, a 3D rendering station, before starting remote work.
VMware tools allow them to be included in a common infrastructure with virtual desktops, providing full remote access to such PCs in compliance with all security rules. This requires only a connection broker and software agents.
Accelerate the adoption of VDI in datacenters with a handy "Flash Clone" feature. Due to the fact that clones are created from already included virtual machines, creating new ones takes a few seconds. At the same time, it is possible to completely avoid such a negative phenomenon as " boot storms ".
The App Volumes solution allows you to instantly install all the necessary applications on a fresh virtual machine, since in the VMware environment there is no copying of files, but only access to the virtual disk is opened.
All that remains is to connect the user profile, and within 5-6 seconds from the moment of login, the employee receives a fresh and fully configured working environment, which is accessed via the Blast Extreme protocol. The latter, by the way, shows itself perfectly even in networks with poor connection quality.
VMware Workspace ONE
In essence, Workspace ONE is a unified console for secure access to physical and virtual workstations (Windows 10, Mac OS, Chrome OS), combined with a powerful analytics platform. This combined solution allows you to control access to end devices and administer any applications on them.
Workspace ONE work applications that meet all of the security requirements of the enterprise infrastructure and connect through the Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub help improve the productivity of remote workers. Among them is a secure email client, a web browser with access to internal resources, tools for working with shared data, etc. The
fundamental advantage of Workspace ONElies in the fact that it can be deployed both as an on-premises solution and as a cloud service. In addition, only this solution allows you to create many "virtual organizations" within one installation, and to each of them connect completely independent mail services, certification services, Active Directory, etc. "Organizations" can be peer-to-peer or nested within each other , and all rules of policy inheritance are configured by the administrator.
And once again about security. Workspace ONE integrates with the newest type of antivirus Carbon Black when needed, whose work is not based on the usual signature analysis, but is based on identifying anomalies in the activity of processes demonstrating deviations from previously studied patterns. Carbon Black alerts are sent to Workspace ONE, which in turn applies one of the configured security policies to the suspicious host, blocking the further spread of the threat.
VMware vSAN
It remains to add that VMware Horizon and VMware Workspace ONE perform best in conjunction with the corresponding storage system. The maximum degree of integration and, as a result, the highest performance of the entire VDI infrastructure can be achieved by using VMware vSAN, a software storage system that is a fault-tolerant solution that uses drives installed in virtualization hosts.
To learn more about the capabilities and principles of VMware vSAN operation, a separate material will help .
Horizon Big Update
By the way, VMware recently announced the release of a new version of its platform for organizing virtual desktops VMware Horizon 8. We are waiting for many innovations, among which are the following:
- Support for Google Cloud VMware Engine, VMware Cloud Dell EMC and Azure VMware (AVS);
- new opportunities to save memory and increase the number of desktops per virtualization host thanks to the updated function of "instant cloning" Instant Clone Smart Provisioning;
- expanding the capabilities of automation of interaction with VMware Horizon 8 through the use of VMware Horizon REST API (NewRESTful);
- optimization of collaboration tools using video and audio (Zoom, Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams);
- Expansion of support for Linux applications that can be published directly from a Linux server on the VMware Horizon platform, without involving other operating systems and without purchasing a license for them.
VMware Horizon 8 is slated for release in October 2020. You can get a lot of new and useful information on how to work with Workspace ONE and Horizon from Syssoft webinars, of which there are already three available ( 1 , 2 , 3 ). And if you are confident in your knowledge of VMware VDI solutions, check it out in a special quiz , the winners of which will receive personal certificates of experts.