Guest Blog Post by Alex Musicante, City of Pittsburgh, PA
One of the key objectives for the City of Pittsburgh’s IT department is to ensure that we can offer the best possible service to our end users, and reduce cost, while still operating as economically feasible (sometimes reduced to beyond feasibility) as possible. One of the processes that have developed under this initiative is to extend our Desktop Infrastructure out from our 175 or so facilities and move it onward and upwards. By that I mean the cloud, well at least the private Cloud (you know it’s all about marketing, right?) and into our employees homes and mobile devices.
What once started as an internal resource management project, (one in which we can have fewer admins dedicated and devoted to solely working on break fix/patching, etc.) and also our CoOp (Continuity of Operations) ongoing struggles. This End-User Computing system was to provide a more robust system that is highly available if in the event of an emergency/disaster and or site relocation.
This resource ended up also being adapted to remote/mobile workforce. It allows any user including our Admins to feel like they never left their desk, (well maybe that’s not a good thing). But it’s also not a bad thing when you get called at 3AM, and don’t even have to get out of bed, just reach for your smartphone or laptop (I have both there, I know I’m a geek) and voila you are back at your desk, most likely not in compliance with your dress code policy! I can access internal resources and be just as productive, and would venture to argue way more productive from home, in the car, you name, I work from there as do a lot of us these days.
So now that we got some background out of the way, what am I pushing to let everyone know? Well, good question. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) might not be new to you, but what may be new, is VMware/Teradici’s PC over Internet Protocol aptly named PCoIP has gone WAN (Wide Area Network) a.k.a. the internet, as of version 4.6.
Now some of you might be asking why you should care. Well for those users who use heavy video, or large spreadsheets always saw that lag and screen refresh/redraw across the remote connections which until recently only sported Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) now has the flexibility to offer a better user experience using what is called PCoIP Secure Gateway (PSG), it is a add-on that could be a part of your existing View Security Server (Remote VMware View Server), and allows you to tunnel remotely without experiencing degradation.
One thing has truly, truly shocked me about this product, and that is, that users love it, and I mean love it. For once, we get calls into our help desk asking to be a part of this project, and paying compliments instead of the usual negative complaining and saying “well <Insert application/system name here> system is down! AGAIN!” Something that was extended to our internal administrative team to lessen the burden has truly turned out to be a godsend. Thanks to VMware my soon to be Dilbert comic’esque existence might soon have to be only lived vicariously solely through Scott Adams’ comic (trust me I could live with that – I can dream can't I).
As I sit here on my recliner at home, reading my RSS feeder, watching television and eating pizza, writing this blog post on the weekend, and not to mention connected into View to monitor all my systems that I administer. I leave you with this, what better way for an Admin to exist, thank you VMware View, and the VMware End-User Computing team, what a time to be an administrator!
