Products such as Quest vWorkspace are often classified as “connection brokers”, for accessing and managing virtual desktops (VDI).  What you might not know is that one can do quite a bit with vWorkspace Desktop Edition, even if one doesn’t have any virtualization infrastructure. 

The following features are well suited for the physical desktops companies currently have today, as well as the virtual desktops they might be planning to deploy:

• Delegated Administration - the vWorkspace Management console can be organized by location/company/department… and administrative control of each object on the console can be delegated to the appropriate IT Personnel. For example, perhaps helpdesk personnel should only be able to remote control users desktops and reboot their PC, whereas 2nd level support may install software, and 3rd level support can use every feature of the vWorkspace Management Console. 
• User Profile Management - Delivers administrator authorized user customizations onto physical or virtual desktops (XP, Vista, 2003 or 2008) without using Roaming Profiles.  This decreases logon times, provides a stable user environment and reduces helpdesk calls.
• MSI Package Deployment - administrators can deploy, update and uninstall MSI packages on desktops from the vWorkspace Management Console.  The Quest vWorkspace Tools for the Managed Desktop (pntools.msi) can even be pushed to individual, multiple or all of the PCs in one’s environment from the vWorkspace Management Console.
• Desktop Management - Administrators can log users off, reboot their PCs, put PCs into sleep mode, wake up PCs that are in sleep mode, shut down or reboot a PC, view and optionally kill processes running on PCs and remote control end users.
• Remote Contol - administrators and helpdesk personnel can remote control user’s desktops to assist them when they require help.  The administrator can share the desktop of the end user, so they can both see what’s happening.
• Secure Remote Access via Quest Web Access and SSL Gateway - This allows for remote access to any corporate desktop, seamless application or even Microsoft App-V virtualized applications from a web browser or thin client and SSL.
• RDP Graphics Acceleration - when users logon remotely, their desktops or seamless applications can be accelerated with the “optional” Experience Optimization Pack - EOP.  Anyone who’s remoted into their corporate desktop via RDP knows that the performance is lackluster.  This accelerates the graphics and reduces the required bandwidth.  Actually all of the EOP features are available for physical PCs, i.e. Multimedia Redirection, Bi-Directional Audio, Local Text Echo and Graphics Acceleration.
• USB Redirection - Full support for USB Devices when connecting remotely to a PC.
• Task Automation - Administrators can schedule automated tasks such as, MSI Package Deployment, Power Management (logon, logoff, shutdown, reboot, sleep, wake-up…), copy files, run scripts…
• Client Settings - Specify via policy which RDP Virtual Channels may be used, for example, clipboard, disk drives, sound, microphone, Multimedia Redirection, Graphics Acceleration…
• Universal Printer Driver - Users logging on via RDP or EOP from a Windows vWorkspace Client can print with full functionality to any printer.  Users accessing a remote PC via non-Windows thin client can even print to network printers via the Universal Printer Driver.
• U3 vWorkspace Client - clients can run a full featured Windows vWorkspace AppPortal Client for remote access to their PC without having to install it, i.e. from a USB Stick.
• Brokering - of course, vWorkspace can broker connections to user’s Physical PCs, just like it can for Virtual Desktops.  Brokering and load balancing of Terminal Services sessions and applications is also available in vWorkspace Enterprise Edition.

So is Quest vWorkspace Desktop Edition a connection broker?  Absolutely, but we also like to think of it as suite for enterprise desktop management and remote access.

Earlier versions of vWorkspace already allowed for delegation of control. This was delegation of the “all or nothing” kind. As our product grew (with more hypervisors and more application and desktop delivery platforms supported ) and our install base grew we learned that we needed to add a more granular way of delegating control in the vWorkspace console. Well, in vWorkspace 6.0 we did we exactly that.

With the enhancements to delegated control in vWorkspace 6.0 you can delegate control to almost every single action that can be performed from the vWorkspace 6.0 Management Console. This allows you to create extremely detailed delegation schemes.

Let’s take a look at an example of how some customers use our delegated control features. Because of the unique nature of vWorkspace we have many customers that choose vWorkspace to deliver applications and desktops from different delivery platforms, all from one product and one console. The support and administration departments relative to these applications and desktop platforms often are (still) separated. Our enhancements to delegated control in vWorkspace 6.0 allows these customer to deal with this and delegate control accordingly.

More specifically, they set up delegation of control in such a way that:

• Members of the TS support department only are allowed to support the vWorkspace Terminal Server users.
• Members of the desktop support department only are allowed to support (virtual) desktop users.
• Members of the TS administration team are only allowed to manage the the vWorkspace Terminal Servers.
• Members of the desktop administration team are only allowed to manage the the vWorkspace managed (virtual) desktops (they actually go even further by delegating control for shadowing but that is a story for another feature spotlight!).

As you can see from this example, the enhancement in delegation of control in Quest vWorkspace 6.0 gives organizations more flexibility in managing their applications and desktop delivery platform(s) while still maintaining a “single pane of glass” administrative experience.

Take a look at how delegation of control look in Quest vWorkspace 6.0 in this short video:

administrative delegation

This blog post will kick off a series a posts that will go through some of the exiting new features of vWorkspace 6.0 in detail. This first “vWorkspace 6.0 feature spotlight” is about our advancements in flexible computer assignments.

One of the edges that vWorkspace has always had on its competitors it the tremendous amount of flexibility that is offered. One of the best examples of this is the fact that almost every resource in the vWorkspace Management Console ( the vMC - one console to rule them all ) can be assigned not just to users or groups but also to:

• IP subnets. This allows you to create your own location based rules (like for printing).
• Client names. Using client names allow you to link a specific client only to a specific resource.
• Active Directory entities. This way you could use an OU as an assignment filter for a resource.

Prior to vWorkspace 6.0, this flexibility was not available for the assignment of managed desktops but now it is! This means that in vWorkspace 6.0 you can assign a managed desktop to Users, Groups, OUs, Client IPs, or Client Names. This is how it looks.

This way of assigning managed desktops was actually based on several customer requests. Since we have been doing VDI for almost 4 years now (which is a very long time in the VDI space) we have had a lot of time and experience to learn and benefit from the knowledge of our customers. The need for more flexible computer assignment is one of the things we learned. For example, one of our customers is using the more flexible computer assignment options to enable the scenario of the “shift-worker” in a hospital, by assigning a particular desktop to a client machine instead of a user.

So, prior to centralizing their applications and desktops, this customer used to have a rich client in a hospital room that locally ran the applications that were used by multiple nurses subsequently, each one continuing the work where the previous shift left of. With the flexible computer assignment options in vWorkspace 6.0 the nurses are able to work in the exact same manner (which is what end users like) while the hospital was reaping the benefits of centralizing their application and desktop workloads.

This hospital is just one of the examples of how this feature can be used. I have seen many more examples ranging from factory personnel to schools. I am sure you can think of other usage cases as well. This small video shows you how to enable this feature:

Flexible Computer Assignment

Of course this is just one of the many new features in Quest vWorkspace 6.0. You can download a fully functional evaluation version of vWorkspace 6.0 here yourself.

In our encounters with customers we learn a lot about what they want to achieve with Quest vWorkspace. Many customer use vWorkspace to be able to centralize and consolidate their application and desktop workloads, whether that is VDI, Terminal Services or other desktops. This centralization and consolidation of application and desktop workloads brings customers many advantages all of which (directly or indirectly) save the customer a lot of money. Let’s be honest, there’s no mystery there: all of us are being asked to do more with less (probably with even less in these challenging economic times) so Quest’s vWorkspace unique characteristics and realistic pricing makes it to be the solution of choice for even more customers today.

Of course there is no such thing as a free lunch. Any project to to centralize and consolidate application and desktop workloads is a comprehensive one. To be able to effectively judge or predict when this project will start to save your company money, a ROI (return on investment) calculation is often required. To be effective and realistic such a ROI investment needs to take in account many, many factors ranging from the “estimated cooling load factor” to the cost of a VECD license. I think that it is safe to say that creating a good ROI analysis is a tedious and time consuming task.

Well, not anymore! Quest has made available a free Quest vWorkspace ROI calculator that allows you to perform a ROI calculation tailored to your business. The Quest vWorkspace ROI calculator takes all the necessary factors and costs into account and even allows you to have full insight into the numbers used. If you want, you can change our default assumptions and use your own numbers. We even have an option to compare the cost of vWorkspace when using the different hypervisors supported by vWorkspace!

The Quest vWorkspace ROI calculator is free for anyone to use with registration only being required if you need to save a reports from the tool.

Go ahead, try out the Quest vWorkspace ROI calculator.

I remember seeing a demonstration some time ago from a VDI vendor that showed they could do multimonitor. I also remembered thinking “so what? we can do that as well”. Over time I realized that I was wrong to assume that the advanced capabilities of Quest vWorkspace were that well-known.

So I decided to create a “blair-witch” demo: I just walked up to one of the cubicles that we have over at the Quest Desktop Virtualisation Group HQ and shot a demo of what vWorkspace can do today. My “cameraman” used a webcam as the camera so if it is not the quality you are accustomed to, you know why.

The important part is that the video shows what Quest vWorkspace 6.0 can do today. In the demo we are showing a vWorkspace session to a Windows XP virtual desktop that:

• uses 4 monitors, with the desktop being only on the first monitor (so not just spanning). You could even use monitors with different resolutions if you want to.
• shows how  applications are able to be monitor aware in a vWorkspace sessions (they can maximize to the monitor they are on)
• where we plug in and use different USB devices in this mulitmonitor vWorkspace sessions
• is playing a full HD movie

This is just a very brief demo that does not even show some of the other features of Quest vWorkspace 6.0 like graphics acceleration, user profile management, universal printing, virtual desktop shadowing or any of the other features…