Quest vWorkspace 7.0 Feature Spotlight: Enhanced Bi-Directional Audio

Today we will be looking into the improvements that were made in vWorkspace with regard to its audio capabilities. With Quest vWorkspace 7.0 the bi-directional audio capabilities have been enhanced to provide for better sound quality while using less bandwidth.

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In this feature spotlight we will have a look at one of the more esthetically pleasing new features of Quest vWorkspace 7.0, in that this version fully supports and extends the RDP7 protocol shipped with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

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In this feature spotlight we will discuss the enhancements to the USB virtualization capabilities of vWorkspace that were introduced in Quest vWorkspace 7.0. USB virtualization was first introduced in vWorkspace 6.0 and allows for the redirection of local USB devices into virtual desktops. This allows customers to, for example, use USB headsets or cameras in their virtual desktop sessions. The enhancements that we made to the USB virtualization in Quest vWorkspace 7.0 allow more control for customers over the virtualized USB devices.

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Today’s post is about a new feature in Quest vWorkspace 7.0 called Flash Acceleration. Flash Acceleration is a part of Quest EOP, a set of technologies built on top of Microsoft RDP aimed at providing a remote user experience that is indistinguishable from a local user experience. Flash Acceleration in Quest vWorkspace 7.0 is actually a double-edged sword: it provides a magnificent user experience whilst improving on scalability of virtual desktop and Terminal Server / RD Session Host environments!

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In today’s feature spotlight we will highlight the support for new platforms in Quest vWorkspace 7.0. With Quest vWorkspace 7.0 the following support, including Microsoft Windows 64-bit versions, has been added to vWorkspace: Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, SCVMM 2008 R2.

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In this second Feature Spotlight on Quest vWorkspace 7.0 we will be having a look at a much requested feature of vWorkspace: User Environment Configuration and Lockdown for desktops. As its name suggest, this feature allow customer to configure and secure the user environment for all vWorkspace sessions.

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Quest vWorkspace 7.0 has been officially released and we are extremely excited about it here at Quest. This post is the first in a series of post (called feature spotlights) that will discuss and demonstrate some of the cool new features in detail. This first post is about VMware Linked Clones Integration and the new Reprovisioning Options.

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For anyone that’s ever worked on a helpdesk, as a desktop administrator or Terminal Services/Citrix administrator it’s no news that user profile management is, and has been an issue since forever. 

Let’s define the problems with Windows User Profiles:

1.  Profile Corruption - Users logon and their profile does not load, leaving them with a temporary profile without any of their personalizations

2.  Logon speed (or lack thereof) - as profiles age the ntuser.dat file grows and the number of files associated with the user’s profile increases.  These cause the user’s logon time to increase over time, starting at 10-15 seconds when the profile is new, and increasing to minutes as time goes on.

3.  It’s not generally accepted to use the same profile for diffent OS, i.e. XP and Server 2003.  In an environment with Terminal Services this typically leads administrators to using two completely different user profiles, for example one for the client OS and one for Windows Terminal Services.

4.  Support for application silos - In a Terminal Services or VDI environment users may access multiple hosts to get their applications, often without their knowledge.  Administrators have the option of using local profiles for each system, or risking use of roaming profiles getting bloated and corrupted due to the registry, start menu and app data being populated with items that have nothing to do with the system being used.

5.  Local user profile cleanup (or lack thereof) -  These profiles can consume massive amounts of disk space on shared systems, so administrators usually have to account for this space, or write scripts to delete them.

Via acquisition of Provision Networks in 2007, Quest acquired one of the only commercially available User Profile Management solutions.  The problem was that it only supported Windows Terminal Services.

In January of 2009 Quest released vWorkspace 6.0, the successor to Provision Networks Virtual Access Suite.  in vWorkspace 6.0 User Profile Management (also known as Metaprofiles) now fully supports Terminal Services, Virtual Desktops and Physical PCs.

So how does it work?

User Profile Management in vWorkspace is a client-server application, where there is an agent on the Virtual PC/Physical PC/Terminal Server, and one or more storage servers for maintaining the user settings. 

Everything is managed from the vWorkspace Management Console, and the components are:

Quest Metaprofiles Agent - Installed on virtual and/or physical desktops running Windows XP/Vista, or Terminal Servers running 2000/2003/2008.  Responsible for downloading compressed user settings (xml files) from the storage server, applying the settings at logon, exporting the settings deleting the local profile at logoff.

Quest Metaprofiles Storage Service - Installed on a Windows server OS hosting the storage service.  This is typically a dedicated virtual machine but could also be on a physical server.  Since this is a client-server application, there is no Windows File Share associated with the storage service.

Quest Connection Broker Service - responsible for directing the Metaprofiles Agent to the correct Storage Server.

A typical deployment of Quest User Profile Management consists of:

1.  Customized local Default User Profile, containing the minimum base user settings for all users logging on.  Common tweaks include removing desktop icons, favorites and eliminating the “Customizing your user preferences” dialog that appears logon for the first time.

2.  Use Group Policy to redirect My Documents, Desktop, Application Data and Start Menu to network file shares, so theses are not copied back and forth at logon/logoff and so roaming profiles are not configured.

3.  Define the application settings that users may customize, which users may customize the settings and on which desktop groups or terminal servers the settings will be applied.  These may be registry entries, directories or files.  Best practice would be to let GPO Folder Redirection manage the majority of files, and only use Quest User Profile Management for specific individual files or folders that are not handled by GPO.  Settings may be marked as “global”, meaning they will apply on any system, or “silo”, meaning they will only apply on specific desktop groups or terminal servers.

4.  Install the Microsoft User Profile Hive Cleanup service to ensure that user profiles are successfully unloaded at logoff.

What are the benefits of implementing Quest User Profile Management:

1.  Stable User Profiles - reduced administrative overhead and helpdesk calls

2.  Fast user logons - typically about 10 seconds, vs 30-60 seconds with roaming profiles

3.  Reduced storage requirements for profile data, since only compressed deltas are maintained, not the entire user profile

4.  Reduced number of Virtual PCs to maintain, as administrators can deploy non-persistent (temporarily assigned) desktops, where the user settings are dynamically applied at logon.

5.  No need to cleanup local user profiles or configure mandatory or roaming profiles.

6.  Quest User Profile Management is included in all versions of Quest vWorkspace, so it’s another critical feature that won’t require the purchase of another 3rd party user profile management tool.

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.

In vWorkspace 6.0 one of the many features we have released is the virtual machine reconfiguration tool.  This tool allows changes to virtual machine memory and virtual disks.

This introduces the ability to change the virtual machines disk mode.  The available modes are Persistent and Non Persistent. When using non persistent disks changes are not saved during the session and are lost at the end of the session (that is, when the virtual machine is powered off or reset). Non persistent  disks are convenient for people who always want to start with a virtual machine in the exactly the same state. 

Example use cases include providing environments for software testing, technical support users, demonstrations of software, or maybe to provide software installation classes for students.

As with many features in vWorkspace there is great flexibility in how you can leverage the disk non persistence feature. To help you understand how this feature can be used, we have created a small guide. The guide will describe the following:

• Supported Virtualization Platforms
• More detail on disk persistence
• Use cases
• How to configure disks on newly deployed virtual machines
• How to configure disks on existing virtual machines
• The methods to revert to the original virtual machine state
• Other considerations

Download the guide here.