Opening a restaurant is a romantic notion that many of us have had at some point in our lives. Create a business plan, identify our target market or customers, and then come up with recipes that will satisfy those customers (and attract lots more). Sounds easy, right? It is time to get cooking! Well, not quite. We must do a bit of planning and preparation before we get to that stage.
Similarly, to ensure a successful VMware Horizon 7 Enterprise Edition project, we must plan and design in a structured and integrated manner. We start by identifying the business requirements and drivers, and defining the use cases (user or customer types) that we intend to serve. We can then decide on the recipes or services that we are going to provide to satisfy those users. The services are built from several components that are modular, efficient and easily customizable.
Get Cooking!
So, are we ready to cook? Again, not quite. We need to design our restaurant; build the kitchen; choose our pots, pans; and everything else that will go into cooking the food, assembling the meal and delivering it to the customer. And we need to do this in a repeatable, standardized and highly scalable manner to easily adapt to new use cases, or to changing demand or scale. The components and elements that will ultimately go into our services should also be reusable across multiple services.
The new Horizon 7 Enterprise Edition Reference Architecture: Validated Integration Design (VID) breaks down this process into an eight-step methodology to:
- Align with the business and the users.
- Define which services we will deliver (recipes).
- Design and build the infrastructure and components required to deliver the services.
- “Cook” the recipes (integrate the services).
- Ensure the users get the desired experience.
As with any design process, this process is cyclical and iterative to make sure that we understand when a choice or design affects a previously made decision.
Dinner Is Served
An important step in this process, and in addressing the use cases, is creating the recipes (or, as we call them, service blueprints). These service blueprints allow us to understand the components and parts that need to be designed, built and integrated in steps 3–6.
And for Dessert…
To provide a common experience across devices, to address more than only Windows applications, and to allow the solution to evolve to changing demands, this reference architecture also includes VMware Identity Manager in every use case. Identity Manager is a service that extends the on-premises directory infrastructure to provide a seamless single-sign-on (SSO) experience to web, mobile, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and legacy applications.
The Validated Integration Design uses key features of Horizon 7 Enterprise Edition such as just-in-time delivery, which combines Instant Clone Technology, VMware App Volumes, and VMware User Environment Manager to provide the accelerated delivery of operating system, applications and user configuration. This combination produces user-customized and fully personalized desktops from standardized building blocks.
The reference architecture design was validated for environmental adaptation, component design and build, service build, integration, user workflow and testing, to ensure that all the objectives were met, that the use cases were delivered properly and that real-world application is achievable.
What Are Your Thoughts?
So, what do you think of the Horizon 7 Enterprise Edition Reference Architecture: Validated Integration Design? We worked hard to address the most common use cases and to provide a methodology that can be adapted to most scenarios. We would love your feedback so that we can make our next reference architecture even better. You can provide comments to this post and share your ideas!
By Graeme Gordon, Senior End-User-Computing Architect, EUC Technical-Marketing Center of Excellence, VMware
