By Harry Labana, vice president of products, End-User Computing, VMware
Organizations today have both virtual and physical IT environments. For those organizations that have made the decision to deploy virtual applications and desktops, they have had to choose between a persistent or non-persistent approach in the past, each with their inherent benefits and drawbacks. For organizations that have deployed persistent physical or virtual environments, they have struggled to manage the user experience consistently across devices. The holy grail has always been an approach that takes the best of persistent and non-persistent desktops to deliver a truly stateless one. Stateless desktops would address the need for IT to keep costs low while also delivering the personalization that end-users require to be productive across their virtual and physical estates. However, offering personalization to thousands or tens-of-thousands of end-users at large organizations can be a daunting task, even for the most talented IT teams.
Some companies have tried to address this daunting task by deploying point products but this approach is hardly a solution. Although it might seem like the task is being addressed, the reality is that the problem is becoming bigger as desktop administrators are presented with an additional problem – solution sprawl and the multitude of management consoles and user policies that have to be set individually for each solution.
We believe there’s a better way.
VMware is announcing today the latest version of its user environment management solution, VMware User Environment Manager™ 9.0 that will help deliver a truly stateless desktop and eliminate the need for point products. The solution will offer new advancements in management and security that will further simplify the delivery of user personas across heterogeneous environments and offer the only certified integration with VMware Horizon® 7 and VMware ThinApp®. This will remove the need for customers to use complex and costly point products, and enables them to streamline the management and monitoring of user environments.
VMware User Environment Manager 9.0 will offer personalization and dynamic policy configuration across any virtual, physical and cloud-based Windows desktop or application environment. VMware User Environment Manager will simplify end-user profile management by providing organizations with a single, lightweight and scalable solution that leverages existing infrastructure. It will also accelerate time-to-desktop and time-to-application by replacing bloated roaming profiles and unmaintainable, complex logon scripts. It is designed to map environmental settings (such as networks and printers), and dynamically apply end-user security policies and personalizations. Utilizing a unified management console for application and user environment management and monitoring, this powerful and scalable solution is engineered to deliver workplace productivity while driving down the cost of day-to-day desktop support and operations.
Advancements available in VMware User Environment Manager 9.0 will include:
New Management Capabilities
- VMware ThinApp Personalization – Will simplify packaging and target customizations based on content which will bring implementing application personalization and configuration across native and virtualized applications into one product (supports VMware ThinApp and other application virtualization vendors). The result will be a dynamically manageable package rather than forcing packagers to anticipate application configuration when creating the virtualized applications –a fundamental step toward simplifying application lifecycle management.
- Unified Administration Console – Offers a single console for IT administrators to build policy to control application deployment via VMware App Volumes, desktop deployment via VMware Horizon 7, and security and usability policy to control those via VMware User Environment Manager.
New Security Capabilities
- Application Authorization/Application Blocking – Will enable IT administrators to build black and white lists of applications to control application and license sprawl using simple configurations.
- VMware Horizon Smart Policy – Will enable IT to reach into the depths of VMware Horizon 7 and set triggers and actions to apply dynamic policies based on end-user context such as location, platform, device, disconnect/reconnect to provision secure and tuned desktops and applications.
- Personal Data Control – Traditional folder redirection will be incorporated into the management console of VMware User Environment Manager 9.0 for end-user data transport, or IT administrators can use a modern approach, such as VMware App Volumes™ Writeable Volumes.
Aaron Black from the product management team offers a deeper look into each one of these features and use cases in his blog post which you can read here, but as you can see, this latest version of VMware User Environment Manager will broaden the solution’s core capabilities while also offering greater integration with the VMware Horizon platform.
Whether an organization has deployed a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution such as VMware Horizon 7, Physical Desktops, Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH) for applications or even Citrix XenApp or Citrix XenDesktop, VMware User Environment Manager 9.0 will help bring personalization, speed, adaptability and policy-based user environment management.
Since companies are in different stages of addressing this challenge with various end-user computing environments within their organization, VMware offers UEM in multiple ways. VMware User Environment Manager 9.0 will be available as a standalone solution, or as part of VMware Workspace ONE™, VMware Horizon 7, and VMware App Volumes.
VMware User Environment Manager 9.0 is expected to be available later this month.
