Employee Experience

Results of VMware Workspace Portal 2.1 Tests Exceed Expectations

By Nancy Beckus, Editor, VMware, and Rasmus Jensen, Senior End-User Computing Architect, EUC Technical Enablement, VMware

This blog summarizes the results of functional and operational tests of Workspace Portal 2.1 running on top of VMware vSphere 5.x, as reported in the VMware Workspace Portal Reference Architecture. In this architecture validation, VMware performed tests to highlight how easy it is to deploy, integrate, and manage Workspace Portal.

Here is an overview of the test results for a 30,000-user deployment of Workspace Portal 2.1:

VMware_Workspace_Portal_2.1_Test_Results
Figure 1: Overview of Test Results for a 30,000-User Deployment of Workspace Portal 2.1

What’s New

Why the focus on testing Workspace Portal 2.1? VMware Workspace Portal 2.1 delivers the following new features and improvements:

  • Workspace Portal is delivered as a single virtual appliance (VA)
  • Horizon Air (DaaS) desktops and applications are now integrated and appear in the Workspace Portal
  • End users can group apps in their Workspace Web User Portal by
    • Marking apps as Favorites
    • Filtering apps by category
  • End users can reset View desktops from their Workspace User Portal
  • End users can use single sign-on (SSO) from their Workspace User Portal to sign in to AirWatch Web Secure Content Locker and to enroll their devices (AirWatch MDM). The AirWatch Secure Content Locker SAML app is pre-configured in the Workspace cloud app catalog.
  • Workspace appliance has the following performance improvements:
    • Faster calculations in user entitlement
    • Easier bulk upload of users and groups from Active Directory during initial Workspace configuration
  • Support for more flexible Active Directory configurations include
    • Single AD domain
    • Multi-domain, single forest
    • Multi-forest with trust relationship
    • Multi-forest with no trust relationship

Design of the Test Environment

The VMware Workspace Portal 2.1 test deployment consisted of 30,000 users of View virtual desktops and 40 applications (SaaS and Web-based applications, ThinApp virtualized applications, and RDSH-hosted applications). The architecture included support of users on multiple devices, including Windows PCs, Macs, and mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. The architecture is scalable for larger deployments and leverages the VMware software-defined data center.

Testing involved manual functional tests across a number of client devices to highlight usability and manageability. In addition, operational tests were conducted to verify entitlements, Active Directory sync tasks, and administration tasks.

VMware_Workspace_Portal_solution_test_results
Figure 2: Workspace Portal Solution Test Results

After Workspace Portal was installed and configured

  • It took 14 minutes to set up and provide access to RDSH-hosted desktops and applications.
  • It took 18 minutes to provision a pool of 100 RDSH desktops.
  • And it took only 10 seconds for users to connect to desktops or applications after they had authenticated to View or Workspace Portal.

The following table shows the functional test results.

FUNCTIONAL TEST TIME TO COMPLETE
Initial deployment and setup of Workspace Portal 30 minutes
Configure Workspace Portal to integrate with View 7 minutes
Access an RDSH application from Workspace Portal 8–10 seconds (6–8 seconds to reconnect)
Access an RDSH desktop from Workspace Portal 10 seconds (6–8 seconds to reconnect)
Access an RDSH application from within a virtual desktop session 8–10 seconds (8–10 seconds to reconnect)
Create a group and filter members based on Active Directory attributes 2 minutes

Table 1: Functional Test Results for the Workspace Portal Implementation

Active Directory Synchronization and Entitlement Testing

Testing verified the performance of Active Directory sync operations as well as entitlement operations for 40 applications and 30,000 users.

All tests were performed using both the default and recommended configurations. The tests used only one Workspace Portal VA. The VA used the internally supplied database. The results show that expanding the resources improved entitlement operations.

TOTAL ENTITLEMENT TIME AVERAGE PER APPLICATION ACTIVE DIRECTORY SYNC TIME
DEFAULT 4 hr, 9 min 7 min, 35 sec 34 min
RECOMMENDED 1 hr, 35 min 2 min, 35 sec 26 min

Table 2: AD Synchronization and Entitlement Test Results

For more detailed information about the Workspace Portal 2.1 test results, see the white paper VMware Workspace Portal Reference Architecture.

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