One of the core design goals in Quest vWorkspace is to supply customers with a agnostic application and desktop delivery platform. We aim to take this design goal as far as our customers ask us to. At Quest we know that just providing users with applications and desktops is only half the proverbial battle. There also is a lot of administrative effort associated with the management of these published applications and desktops. Management of existing user sessions is a perfect example of this. An existing Quest vWorkspace customer that was using Quest Terminal Servers very heavily was slowly but surely also deploying VDI to facilitate certain usage cases (in this case their remote developers). As the VDI environment grew so did the support requirement. They wanted to be able to use the one vWorkspace Management Console to also manage the sessions of their VDI users.

That’s why in this vWorkspace feature spotlight I would like to talk about the enhancements we made to session management in vWorkspace 6.0. What we’ve done is taken the session management tools that were available for Terminal Server and also make them available for desktop sessions (note that we say “desktop” on purpose because VDI for us is just another “desktop”). So this means that you can Remote Control (or Shadow for those Terminal Server lovers out there) any session running in a vWorkspace farm.

So you can still view all the Quest Terminal Server sessions running in your farm and manage them as you were used to. In addition you now can do exactly the same for desktop sessions running in a vWorkspace farm. We even have created a special, unique, option in our management console that provides a single consolidated view of all user sessions, regardless of the delivery method used. Take a look at this example:

The screenshot shows the session differentiated by delivery platform but you can sort by any criteria you , such as user name. I sometimes say that the mere fact that a desktop is going to virtualized does -unfortunately- not mean that they are going to be perfect and self-managing. For example: users will still contact the helpdesk to complain that their “computer has frozen up”. The patient and understanding person and the other of the line will now to terminate (no offense Microsoft) explorer.exe. This can all be done from our console. Take a look at these screenshots that show the querying of the processes running in a certain desktop session:

And the subsequent unfortunate termination of the explorer.exe proces:

 

This way vWorkspace 6.0 is able to provide a seamless session management experience regardless of the delivery platform used, all from a single console. No need to buy another tool or upgrade your license just to be able to manage all of the users in your environment. Remember that our advanced delegated control capabilities allow you to use this feature even more efficiently.

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