The term ‘mission critical’ in IT has been synonymous with major business applications that perform core functions within an enterprise. However, we are starting to see that term also being applied to the underlying end-user computing platform – in the context of an always available service. The idea being that a mission-critical application requires an equally mission-critical platform capable of delivering that application to its end-users 7x24x365 – wherever they are.
This has been very evident over the past several years in the healthcare sector where the global movement toward a paperless electronic medical records (EMR) environment has hugely impacted the availability SLA’s for desktop services. It’s easy to make the connection between desktop availability and patient care delivery through the EMR application’s availability.
Similar reliance on desktop services is also being identified in other sectors such as financial services, manufacturing, retail and others. This is driven by the fact that cost of downtime is getting progressively higher due to loss in business productivity, customer impact, missed business service levels, impact on deadline commitments etc.
In fact, many organizations are going away from allowing for routine planned downtimes in their desktop SLA frameworks. This clearly challenges status-quo in areas such as patch management and application updates/upgrade where each update cycle is likely to require at least one reboot which constitutes a planned downtime event. Multiplied by number of end-points and duration of each reboot, the total planned outage puts a large dent in the total availability SLA – situation gets worse if we add unplanned outages to the equation. These factors are ushering in the beginning of the always-on desktop service model.
So, how do you get to an always-on service within a distributed physical desktop environment? Answer is you can’t! The architecture supporting the desktop service has to be fundamentally different. And that’s where VMware’s AlwaysOn Desktop offering provides this much-needed solution.
AlwaysOn Desktop combines a scalable, modular and resilient architecture with the Horizon platform built on top of VMware’s category-leading vSphere hypervisor environment. The result is a proven solution that is ready for large-scale adoption by organizations planning to upgrade their desktop platform to a mission-critical service.
But how do the pieces fit together? And how do I know it is going to work?
Enterprise customers need built-in security and mobility plus they need a solution that is validated – they don’t have time or budget for experimentation. They need a solution that is easy to implement, robust to operate, scales up modularly and for end-users it delivers the same if not better performance as their physical desktop.
Introducing the freshly updated VMware AlwaysOn Validated Design Guide.
This guide provides an overview of the VMware AlwaysOn Desktop solution, its logical architecture, and validation of the capabilities by VMware experts. Based on products from VMware, and other generally available software, this architecture represents the foundation on which customers and partners can build comprehensive desktop solutions that require high-availability for end-user computing (EUC) services.
The AlwaysOn Desktop solution is based on VMware Horizon 6 taking advantage of the new features and functionality such as:
- Application delivery – VMware App Volumes™ (third-party products with similar capabilities are also supported)
- Profile management – VMware User Environment Manager™ (third-party products with similar capabilities are also supported)
- Storage platform – VMware Virtual SAN™ (third-party storage platforms with similar capabilities are also supported)
- Desktop pool security and segmentation – VMware NSX ™
The architecture for AlwaysOn Desktop is illustrated in two perspectives:
- Logical stack – Shows all layers in a typical implementation as well as interconnections between layers in terms of dependencies.
- Component-level architecture – Shows the products required within the layers identified in the logical stack. This design validation guide covers four variants for each perspective:
- With the Workspace platform
- With the Imprivata OneSign platform for proximity card access plus Workspace—Active Directory authentication via OneSign followed by launching VMware Workspace Portal
- With the Imprivata OneSign platform for proximity card access and SSO functionality—no Workspace included
- N+1 redundancy configuration with any of the above scenarios
Figure 1: Example of Logical Stack Based on VMware Workspace
Consult your VMware representative on how to implement this architecture with your preferred vendors and supported products. This document will be updated as newer capabilities are incorporated in the AlwaysOn Desktop solution.
Now when your desktop, applications and data – absolutely positively HAVE to be there – VMware has a solution for you.
Learn more about AlwaysOn Desktop solution at #VMworld2015
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EUC5965 – Mobilizing Healthcare: From Shared to Personal Clinical Workspaces… And Beyond!
By Tisa Murdock and Farid Agahi, business strategist for industry solutions at VMware
