Workspot delivers Cloud PCs for enterprise use cases across multiple AWS cloud regions. We are pleased to extend the choices Enterprise customers have for deploying Cloud PCs to include Amazon WorkSpaces Core. We make it simple to deploy, scale and troubleshoot Cloud PCs across all Amazon WorkSpaces Core regions via a single admin console. Workspot provides both persistent and non-persistent desktops, virtual apps and hosted shared desktops, as well as GPU accelerated desktops in AWS. Customers can go “all-in” on the cloud, or they can deploy Cloud PCs in the cloud and on-prem in their own data center, tailoring the deployment to the unique needs of each organization.

Our solution uniquely delivers significant business benefits that have not been achievable previously, including fast time-to-initial-value, innovative cost-optimization techniques, performance that delights even the most demanding end users, and global, real-time Cloud PC observability and health analysis using Workspot Watch and Workspot Trends.

The team at AWS has produced a blog with all the technical details about how to provision, configure and deploy Workspot Cloud PCs for Amazon WorkSpaces Core. This is the blog for you if you want to know more about licensing, creating an Amazon WorkSpaces custom bundle, joining the domain, setting up the Workspot Enterprise Connector and RD Gateway, managing the desktop VM, connecting with the Workspot Client, and more. Access the blog from the Amazon Workspaces Core team, “How to Set Up Workspot Cloud PCs and Amazon WorkSpaces Core” now.

To learn more:

Check out our product announcement “Workspot announces Cloud PCs powered by Amazon WorkSpaces Core” by Ivan O’Mahony, Senior Product Manager for AWS End User Computing services, focused on Amazon WorkSpaces Core.

• Go to workspot.com/AWS and signup for the Early Access Product Program for Workspot Cloud PCs for Amazon WorkSpaces Core.
• You can also come and see Workspot and AWS together in Nashville at the IGEL Disrupt 2023 event April 3rd through 5^th at the Gaylord Resort and Conference Center.  Our CEO, Amitabh Sinha, will be highlighting Workspot Cloud PCs for Amazon WorkSpaces Core during the early Wednesday general session. We’ll have live demos in the Expo Hall and I’ll be there along with Mark Callahan to share the latest innovations during our Workspot Technical Bootcamp and Breakout sessions.

And we’re saving the best for last as we share a very special treat for the EUC community: Mark Templeton’s Closing Keynote where he’ll be answering the top three questions he gets all the time:

1) What have you been up to?
2) Why Workspot? (he’s our Workspot Board Chairman)
3) What does the future hold?

No spoiler alerts here, but VDI Modernization is a core theme of Mark’s keynote, and his signature “One More Thing…” will pique your imagination – Cloud PCs could evolve in ways you may have never imagined. Hope to see you there!

The post New! AWS Has Published a Technical Guide for Workspot on Amazon Workspaces Core appeared first on Workspot.

It has been a rough road for VDI and especially for the organizations that have struggled with their implementations. The complex, do-it-yourself (DIY) model, using a solution stack built for a single customer in a single data center, is no longer relevant in the cloud era. What’s readily doable today goes leaps and bounds beyond the promises of legacy VDI to deliver real business value – fast. Here’s how.

SaaS Cloud PCs in the Fast Lane

So, if you take a look at the VDI stack in terms of capabilities, there are three broad areas to examine – infrastructure (servers, storage, and virtualization), legacy VDI software and finally, the integration & operations needed to run the solution. Even though a lot of attention is often focused on the legacy VDI software stack, the overall solution cost & complexity stems primarily from the integration and ongoing operation of the VDI stack.

The Workspot Enterprise Desktop Cloud is the first virtual desktop solution built for the public cloud era. It’s turnkey SaaS that modernizes legacy VDI. Because we deliver virtual desktops as a service, you don’t have to deal with any of the complexity anymore. We do it for you. Plus, it’s important to note that we invented cloud-native virtual desktops; we are not just running someone else’s technology. The close partnerships we have with our customers are enabled by a very short feedback loop. Your pilot can be up and running in a few days, and your production rollout live in 30-90 days, depending on the complexity of your enterprise requirements. Our Go-Live Deployment Services cover helping you roll out your first production use case to the first set of users. As a company, we are focused on your business success, because that’s the only way we can all be successful. So we include the services needed to take you live into the cost of your subscription fee. Our solution is priced at a flat rate per user – the rate depends on the configurations you choose for your cloud desktops and workstations. Finally, we take full responsibility for the SLA of your Cloud PCs – all the elements in the blue box in the picture below, including the availability of the public cloud. Imagine what you can do with all those IT resources you can free up!

Old Way                              New Way

It’s time to modernize VDI with Cloud PCs.

Now, inventing a cloud-native, SaaS Cloud PC platform is a tough problem, because a true SaaS service has to be multi-tenant and turnkey, and this necessitates building the solution from scratch. Legacy, single-tenant, DIY, on-premises VDI architectures cannot be evolved into a cloud-native SaaS service. Multiple legacy software vendors have tried and failed with this approach – witness Siebel, BMC, Peoplesoft and others.

You can build a great cloud-native service in one data center. But the public cloud adds another strategically important dimension which is at the crux of realizing business value: the ability to take advantage of the edge of the cloud.

A New Virtual Desktop Architecture is Required for the Public Cloud Era

If you look at all legacy software stacks – databases, app servers, and VDI – they were built for a single data center, and with great difficulty and a ton of IT resources, customers operated them in 2-3 data centers. Often this was done with replicated instances and management. The public cloud offers each customer the ability to run software in tens of cloud regions worldwide – essentially you have tens of data centers available to you. These cloud regions are also connected using the best, fastest, most reliable networks. A completely new, built-from-the-ground-up architecture was needed to take advantage of the massive scale of the public cloud, because you simply cannot install and operate 50 copies of everything and hope to succeed. So, that’s what we built; the Workspot Desktop Control Fabric a cloud-native, globally distributed architecture that allows you to scale horizontally across cloud regions – in minutes. That is a massive innovation in the VDI space that is fundamentally transforming how companies do business and how they grow.

The Desktop Control Fabric – Only from Workspot

The diagram below illustrates what’s possible as organizations take advantage of cloud-scale virtual desktops. With other Cloud PC solutions, you need specialized public cloud skills, because you’ll have to deal with compute, storage, networking, and images in each cloud region. Your costs will vary in each cloud region, and they will add up to what could be an unpleasant surprise.

First and foremost, Workspot’s mission is to alleviate VDI complexity and reduce the costs of operating virtual desktops, so we built an Workspot Desktop Control Fabric, a global, elastic architecture that abstracts and simplifies the public cloud for virtual desktop use cases. Today your organization has access to more than a hundred cloud regions – and counting. With Workspot’s SaaS Cloud PC platform, you simply select the cloud regions closest to your users, then select yourCloud PC configurations – how many CPUs, how much memory, and how much storage for each. Then, you leave the rest to us! It’s our job to deliver on the SLA of your Cloud PCs globally.We also help you manage the costs whether you’ve chosen a flat-pricing or pay-as-you-go model.

Additionally, you have the opportunity to map the unique requirements for each of your use cases to the Cloud PC best suited for the job. You might want persistent Windows 10/11 desktops for your developers and CAD designers. You might want non-persistent desktops or Windows application access for your call center agents; some users need GPUs, some don’t. And so on…

Finally, even though your end users are distributed across the globe, they experience great performance because their desktops and data are located in the nearest cloud region. When was the last time you heard that VDI performance is better than a local desktop or workstation? Never? We hear this every day about our Cloud PCs and workstations.

Workspot’s global, multi-cloud Desktop Control Fabric is a massive innovation for virtual desktops.

It’s really important to note that Workspot helps IT manage all the layers – cloud, fabric, use cases, and users –  through a single pane of glass. No one else can do this.

The fabric has obvious benefits for creating a global Cloud PC footprint, including fast time to value and great performance for your users, but those benefits are just the beginning.  For example, the elastic nature of the fabric reduces end-user desktop provisioning time dramatically, especially when integrated with your favorite IT service catalog, such as ServiceNow. Also, deep instrumentation embedded in every layer of the Cloud PC stack allows for intelligent, real-time root cause and blast radius analysis – on a global scale – to meet the most demanding SLAs.

Ready to talk with Workspot about your use case requirements? We can help you ask the right questions of all the vendors you evaluate to ensure the solution you choose sets you up for success. Schedule a demo now!

The Cloud Desktop Fabric is a trademark of Workspot, Inc. and is patent pending.

The post What is the Workspot Desktop Control Fabric Architecture for SaaS Cloud PCs? appeared first on Workspot.

Figure 1: The five major approaches to virtual desktops. Each has tradeoffs to consider.

Here are the five approaches to virtual desktops defined:

1. Legacy VDI (Integrator): The customer can buy software from the vendor and use an integrator to develop and deploy their solution. This is a single-tenant solution designed to be deployed in a single data center.
2. Legacy VDI (Hoster): The customer can “rent” virtual desktops as a service from a hosting provider who runs the VDI stack on their behalf. This is a single-tenant solution designed for a single data center.
3. Broker as a Service: The customer can use an integrator to take a vendor’s virtual desktop broker service and create an integrated solution. Many broker as a service solutions are multi-tenant. However, the service provided by the integrator may be limited to a single data center because the broker as a service is installed only in a single data center and is therefore performant only for that data center.
4. Desktop as a Service: This is a turnkey service built on a multi-tenant architecture. However, there are limitations to enterprise customizability because of the integrated control/data plane.
5. Cloud Desktop Fabric: Workspot’s architecture innovation uniquely uses the globally distributed public cloud to create a global fabric of cloud desktops across cloud regions. The key architectural difference is that the control and data planes are separate in the Cloud Desktop Fabric.

So why is a separated control/data plane so critical to taking advantage of a globally distributed public cloud? Why does cloud desktop architecture matter?

Fundamental Change in Infrastructure

Legacy VDI architecture made sense in 2009, when most customers operated one or just a few data centers. During this time, IT’s focus was on vertical scalability problems, i.e. how does IT scale up to more users within a single data center?

But today the problem has changed entirely. Now with the public cloud, IT teams essentially have access to dozens, and in the future, hundreds, of data centers. This is what the public cloud affords them, and it’s this fundamental change in infrastructure that is driving the need for a new virtual desktop architecture.

Figure 2: Infrastructure changes drive the need for a new virtual desktop architecture

The Focus for IT has Shifted

Today the technology decisions IT teams make are absolutely fundamental to an enterprise’s ability to grow, and the key considerations have changed:

1) Instead of packing more users into a single data center, IT has the opportunity to deliver a cloud desktop service from dozens of data centers globally.
2) IT is evolving from an operator of a few data centers to a strategic, global service provider for internal business units.
3) Users can be anywhere now. Market pace and business drivers such as M&A and global enterprise footprints mean that IT can no longer plan on predictable and unchanging locations for users.

This is why the focus has shifted to horizontal scalability. Now IT teams need to ask:  How can we take advantage of the massive scale of the global public cloud and easily deploy resources across dozens of data centers? Horizontal scalability becomes even more important as faster and more ubiquitous networks, such as 5G, are rolled out. By locating resources in the region closest to each end-user, IT can deliver much better performance.

So as IT evolves into a global service provider, the legacy VDI architecture, designed for a single data center, just doesn’t fit the requirements moving forward. What other architectures are available to IT?

Analogy: Control/Data Plane Separation in Software-Defined Networking

Figure 3: The evolution of Software-Defined Networking is analogous to VDI architecture evolution.

An analogous concept is how traditional networks evolved into the Software-Defined Network. In a traditional network, the control and data planes are tightly integrated. The whole stack (aka “control and data planes”) must be replicated in every location. Simple changes to the control plane become prohibitively difficult because upgrades to the control plane affect the data plane also. In layman’s terms, the network is impacted for every change made and each change has to be made to each office in the enterprise –  independently.

Companies like Meraki (WLAN) and Nicira (Networking) revolutionized networking by separating the control and data planes. Access points became stateless physical devices that could be “programmed” from the cloud. No longer does IT have to manually configure each access point. They can create a configuration in the cloud, send an access point to an office and anyone can plug it in. Once plugged into the network, the access point dynamically configures itself. This simplifies deployment and ongoing IT operations on a global and distributed scale.

The same control/data plane separation needs to occur in the VDI architecture to take advantage of the public cloud’s massive scale without increasing load on IT operations. This is why we cannot emphasize enough the importance for IT decision-makers to understand the implications of different VDI architectures. Let’s review the currently available architectures and how they impact IT’s ability to manage a globally available service.

Legacy VDI: Control/Data Plane Integration

In legacy VDI, control/data planes are integrated. They are designed to run for a single-tenant, in a single data center environment (Figure 3 represents the customer domain).  Because of this architecture, the implementation can meet the requirements of leveraging the existing corporate image, corporate tools, corporate authentication, and corporate IT processes. However, there are also serious drawbacks. An integrated control/data plane results in limited scalability and poorer availability. The typical VDI control/data plane stack cannot scale beyond a few thousand users. And if the control plane is unavailable for any reason, the entire system is unavailable.

Figure 4: Control and data planes are integrated in Legacy VDI

The entire stack – control and data plane – needs to be replicated (often within the data center) every time a few thousand users are added and must always be replicated in each additional data center. As a result, most IT organizations must have a dedicated team of specialists to constantly manage the complexity that comes with this level of deployment.

Figure 5: The entire stack must be replicated in each data center or cloud region.

DaaS Solutions: Control/Data Plane Integration

Figure 6: Traditional DaaS solutions continue to run on an integrated control/data plane architecture

Most DaaS vendors have implemented multi-tenancy, yet retained the integrated control/data plane architecture. With this type of solution, multiple customers can use the service, but they share both the control and data planes. This control/data plane integration makes it challenging for the DaaS provider to enable corporate images for desktops, corporate tools, corporate authentication, etc. In some cases, the DaaS provider’s change management process to update Windows may take weeks. If the DaaS provider has multiple global data centers with the service, then IT can run independent DaaS operations in each data center to achieve global reach. However, IT must then manage data centers independently, which introduces the complexity that comes from managing siloed operations. IT cannot manage their entire desktop infrastructure from a single console, and will face other issues like configuration drift, and siloed monitoring and troubleshooting.

So the typical DaaS solution is good for IT organizations that want a hosted service, do not need any customizations, and are open to a generic “one-size-fits-all” service in a single region.

Broker as a Service Solutions: Partially Separated Control/Data Plane

Figure 7: Newer Broker as a Service solutions support customization but may have security & performance drawbacks

Broker as a service solutions have partially split the control/data planes. Unlike traditional DaaS, with a modern broker as a service solution, IT can now use some of their corporate processes, corporate tools, and corporate images. There may be some limitations to security customizations because of the shared gateway that is used across tenants. Also, since brokers are installed in a single data center, performance is best if the desktops exist in the same data center as the broker. However, if the users are closer to another data center without the broker, then expect additional latency, as traffic must flow from the user to the broker’s data center to the desktop data center. This is also known as “tromboning.” Alternatively, the broker must be replicated in each data center to mitigate latency.

So the typical broker as a service solution is good for IT organizations that prefer using integrators for deployment, have desktops within the same data center as the broker or are ok with longer latencies impacting user experience, and for organizations that have flexible security requirements.

Workspot Cloud Desktop Fabric: Separate Control/Data Planes

Figure 8: Workspot’s unique architecture completely separates the control  and data planes

In designing Workspot’s cloud desktop platform, we made a fundamental architectural decision to separate the control and data planes. The data plane (red box) runs in each data center in the customer’s cloud instance. The data plane inherits customer environments – corporate image, corporate authentication, security stack, corporate tools, and corporate processes. A single control plane (shared by all customers) allows IT to control all the data planes from a single pane of glass and without having to manage the vertical scalability of a legacy VDI architecture.

So with Workspot, IT has maximum customizability within a single data center. But what about horizontal scalability? How does it enable IT to become the global service provider to internal business units?

The Cloud Desktop Fabric is a New Paradigm for DaaS

Built on the separate control/data plane foundation, the Workspot Cloud Desktop Fabric provides a single pane of glass that can control cloud desktop provisioning, policies, entitlements, and brokering across the globe for multiple customers in multiple cloud regions. IT can deliver the service from a single data center or 100 data centers; deliver desktops to a single business unit with a global footprint of 10s of data centers; or even multiple business units leveraging any number of data centers, each with 100s of unique images and heterogenous security requirements. The Workspot Cloud Desktop Fabric solves the vertical and horizontal scaling issues faced by IT. Key benefits of the fabric architecture include:

1. Respond to business opportunities with fast & easy horizontal scalability
2. Customer data never crosses the control plane for Zero Trust Security
3. Global cloud desktop management via a single pane of glass dramatically simplifies IT
4. Cloud desktops placed in the closest cloud region deliver phenomenal performance

The Workspot Cloud Desktop Fabric is designed for IT organizations that have evolved into strategic, global service providers that enable enterprise growth.

Figure 9: Strategic IT is now a business growth-enabler

Learn More About Workspot Cloud Desktops on Azure

Let’s find 30 minutes to discuss your cloud-first initiative, why moving desktop workloads to the cloud is a high-return activity, and how easy it is to implement. Request a demo here and we’ll coordinate a discussion with one of our product experts.

The post The Secret Sauce for Cloud Desktop Success appeared first on Workspot.

The Virtual Desktop “Dial Tone”

You can fly off to some remote corner of the world you’ve never been before, walk out of the airport, and reach for your cell phone. These days, you are pretty confident that you can make a call or check your favorite feed – an everyday miracle we may not think about very much. If you’re like me, you have only a modicum of understanding about the hardware, software, networks, and other resources this feat requires, and chances are you have no idea who the local carrier is when you land in Lima, or Prague, or wherever you landed. You might think of this as your “dial tone”, meaning it just works wherever and whenever you need it (if you are a millennial: a phone used to be used just for voice communication, and it made a funny sound – a dial tone – that told you the system was ready for you to dial and connect to the world).  Today we want to explore the question: Is there a “dial tone” for virtual desktops? In other words, is there a way to access your virtual desktops anytime, from anywhere in the world, and be able to expect the same kind of availability and reliability that the old-school dial tone delivered?

An Innovative Approach to the New Business SLA

Virtual desktops are the most mission-critical workload in the enterprise. If Office 365 is unavailable, you can’t access email, but you’ll live. If SAP is unavailable, you cannot access SAP. But if your virtual desktop is not available you cannot access anything. Zero productivity. Nada. We’ve heard that painful story too many times.

With legacy VDI operations, ensuring the availability of a VDI solution stack is complex. You have to make all the piece-parts – brokers, databases, servers, load balancers, and other infrastructure components – highly available. Even after doing all that, when things don’t function right, IT teams find out there’s a problem only when they start getting a flood of unhappy users calling into support. What a nightmare!

Workspot’s SLA for our turnkey cloud desktop service is industry-leading at 99.95%, but that’s just part of the story. The need for high-availability across cloud desktops, public cloud infrastructure, your network, etc.. is obvious. And although Workspot does not control all of that equation, our service monitoring capabilities can help IT teams quickly identify the source of a problem so they can take action faster, and stay on top of the overall business SLA.

Making sure that virtual desktops are highly available is one of the most important tasks of Workspot’s SaaS platform. We approach the critical task of delivering highly available and reliable Cloud Desktops through four innovative steps:

1. Stateful client architecture
2. Deep, real-time instrumentation
3. Pro-active, real-time root cause analysis
4. Pro-active, real-time blast radius analysis

Cloud Desktop High-Availability Is the Foundation for Business SLA

Stateful Client Architecture

A typical legacy VDI deployment contains multiple components deployed in highly available pairs — SQL servers, load balancers, portals, brokers, licensing servers, provisioning servers, etc. Multiple components are involved in every single user request, sometimes multiple times. It can take upwards of 30 handshakes among those components for a user to log in to their desktop. 30! Those 30+ steps include authentication, identifying resource entitlements, and then connecting users to the resources. Those 30+ steps happen every single time a user tries to connect because the legacy VDI clients are typically stateless. Through the power of compounding, even if each of the steps is 99% reliable, the overall sequence is now only 74% reliable (0.99^30 = 0.74). That’s only if everything works! If something does go wrong and a user is unable to login, how do you figure out which one of those 30 steps failed?

Unlike with legacy VDI, the Workspot clients are stateful. After the first login, the client stores much of the information needed. This means that when a user opens their Workspot client, not only do they immediately see what resources they can access (without even talking to the cloud), they also have the information needed to connect to those resources. Thus, Workspot reduces the user’s access to the resources they need to be productive to a single step. The control plane pushes any changes in entitlements or resources to the client in real-time. This stateful client architecture delivers much better availability. Even if the control plane is unavailable, the user can still connect to the resource (as long as the resource is available).

Deep, Real-Time Instrumentation

The key to maintaining a reliable service isn’t really about creating perfect configurations that never have problems… things can and will still go wrong. The fabric will have scalable clusters of infrastructure, performance tuning, and service failover; it is even able to quickly move users to different regions for disaster recovery. Here the key questions are: How proactively are the issues detected and managed?  What was the actual cause of the problem? Who is about to be affected unless action is taken?

The first step in delivering a better SLA is to know what is going on everywhere. We start with the user’s point of view. If a user is unable to connect to their virtual desktop or is seeing poor performance (due to high latency or low bandwidth), we need to know about it in real-time. Next we need to know about everything in between that the user touches in order to connect to their virtual desktop – the network, the gateway, the region of the cloud and the virtual machine. Plus other infrastructure components that are needed to deliver a desktop experience like AD, DNS, etc. And all of this needs to happen in real-time. The cloud enables us to collect vast amounts of data in real-time.

Pro-Active, Real-Time Root Cause Analysis

The steady stream of Cloud Desktop monitoring data is not yet useful in itself. The important part is how it is effectively used, in real-time, to shine a light on the real source of problems. Here is where the Cloud Desktop Fabric comes into play. Because the Workspot control plane is involved in every step of provisioning and configuring the infrastructure, it maintains a model of all the dependencies between the underlying services. That means it can “understand” how the components affect each other.

Let’s take an example. One morning the system observes a spike in connection retry attempts, causing a delay for 5 users in Northern Europe. What might be going on?

How can the dependency model help out here? The system “knows” that the pool of desktops involved in these events is mapped to a certain region’s cluster of gateways, that is also monitored as part of the fabric.  Because all of the first attempts at connection went through Gateway A of the cluster, and then failed over to Gateway B, it can correlate this fact with events it has received directly from the monitoring agent on Gateway A.

Of course, these might simply be isolated events that don’t require any immediate action. What if, however… they are a proverbial “canary in the coal mine”, and there is a more serious threat?  Consider some of the other possible actual culprits: Has Gateway A any problems with memory consumption, security certificate, or networking?  Is it no longer able to access the customer’s AD to authenticate the user? Is there a problem in the customer’s own network? Whatever the real root cause, it can be determined in real-time thanks to the Cloud Desktop Fabric that can connect the dots much faster than a support engineer trolling through log files looking for clues.

Pro-Active, Real-Time Blast Radius Analysis

Once a root cause is identified, what then? Important questions to ask first are: What is the scope of the potential failures? Is it one user? One pool of users? An entire region?  That same global dependency graph that is maintained by the control plane comes to the rescue again.

Sometimes we can “predict” failures based on infrastructure components going down. If a public cloud region is unavailable, all users within that region across multiple customers will be affected. We know that this is going to happen even if no users are logging in at that instant in time. Or if a gateway in a region is unavailable, we know that all users who generally connect through that gateway will have that load shifted to other gateways. At best it will strain the health of the cluster, or could even lead to users not being able to connect at all.

Depending on the root cause and the blast radius, pro-active steps to address the problem can be quickly taken. Additional gateways can be spun up dynamically. Automated maintenance operations can be triggered. The right people can be alerted!

The Global Dial Tone for Virtual Desktops: Only with Workspot

The consumers of a global, turnkey, cloud desktop service should now expect a “dial-tone” for virtual desktops; that is, users have the ability to connect to their cloud desktop or cloud GPU workstation from anywhere, at any time, and from a variety of devices, and experience outstanding performance. An IT administrator can expect cloud desktop provisioning to be fast, template updates to run smoothly, and expansion to new use cases around the globe to happen surprisingly quickly. With Workspot’s highly sophisticated instrumentation, root cause analysis and blast radius analysis, problems can be addressed quickly, if not proactively. Instead of needing to know exactly how this all functions, IT teams can be confident that there is an enterprise-ready, Global Desktop Fabric providing the virtual desktop dial tone – that just works.

Let’s talk about your enterprise requirements! Schedule a demo now.

The post Cloud Desktops Deliver A Global, Virtual Desktop “Dial Tone” appeared first on Workspot.

How to Get a Virtual Desktop Anywhere in the World in 60 Minutes

Let’s say you have contract developers in multiple locations around the world.  Shashi, a developer based in India, needs a particular GPU desktop, and she needs it fast – within minutes of approval by her boss. Now what do you do?

Shashi opens up ServiceNow, her company’s IT service catalog. She finds a pre-defined offering for a 2-CPU machine, with GPU, and 16 GB RAM in the catalog. Perfect! She submits a request for the virtual desktop. Shashi’s request then flows through a standard business process which results in her manager approving the request. This kicks off automation that invokes an integration with Workspot APIs. A virtual desktop is quickly spun up for Shashi in the cloud region closest to her, and a few minutes later she receives an email with the instructions on how to access it. When she does, she experiences cloud desktop performance with less than 25ms latency.

The upshot: within minutes of the original request, our developer has access to exactly the right cloud desktop, hosted in the local cloud region in India, and she is productive immediately, experiencing  better performance than a physical PC could.  Her cloud desktop has all the apps and configurations she needs to start using it immediately. The best part: This super-efficient process for getting that desktop is exactly the same for developers in any region of the world.

Workspot & ServiceNow Integration Enables Cloud Desktop
Provisioning in Minutes

Self-Service Elasticity is the Super Power of Cloud Desktops

Let’s think about this metaphor of a “fabric”, and for a moment, take it literally. So, let’s “stretch” the metaphor a bit more (pun intended). You may want to stretch the fabric into new cloud regions because you have a new office coming on board in the Philippines. Or you may want to stretch the fabric to reach India because you are adding more users in there.  The global desktop “fabric” is both elastic and resilient.

Before the invention of the power loom, a blanket might have been made by handiwork out of scraps of hand-woven cloth, creating a patchwork quilt. This is an apt description of the state of most VDI solutions – especially when built-out over multiple regions. At best, you will have a mix of virtual machines, networks, policies, configurations, scripts, and who knows what other bits and pieces. As fabrics go, quilts may be interesting to look at, but in the VDI world, that interesting mix of piece parts requires too much manual effort to stretch within one region, let alone across multiple regions.

By contrast, the word “fabric” suggests something machine-made; the raw material has been transformed into potentially complex, repeating patterns that produce something that is both simple to use and resilient. In the case of a Cloud Desktop Fabric, the infrastructure has been “woven” into a reliable, interlinked, regular network of services. This architecture is fundamentally easier to define, manage, and perhaps most importantly, stretch! It’s elegant in its simplicity, yet it’s also robust and performs flawlessly in a variety of conditions.

Enter the Cloud Desktop Fabric

With the right architecture, an on-demand, elastic Cloud Desktop solution is available to you readily. Workspot customers simply select their cloud desktop and cloud workstations configurations and images, and their enterprise use cases are quickly deployed using Workspot’s ground-breaking elastic infrastructure layer called the Cloud Desktop Fabric. This is a single pane of glass that provisions and manages cloud desktops in the Azure regions closest to each of your employees, contractors, and partners – often less than 25 ms away – for low latency that means amazing performance, wherever they are. Best of all, as your deployment needs change, the fabric is always ready to accommodate them.

The Workspot Cloud Desktop Fabric Architecture for VDI

The bottom line: The Cloud Desktop Fabric is more than a high-performance desktop deployment architecture: it actually takes end user computing to a new level – now it’s a global, elastic utility. In an upcoming post, we will discuss the concept of the Cloud Desktop “dial tone”, and how the Cloud Desktop Fabric architecture enables it.

How is this a Game Changer?

Consider what is involved in expanding legacy VDI into a new geographical region. You would have to:

• Set up the network infrastructure, storage, and other base resources in every new region
• Provision VMs to run required infrastructure, such as protocol gateways & virtual desktop templates
• Configure a virtual desktop pool for every new region
• Configure the correct users for the correct pools

Now, repeat that for every, single. region.  Imagine keeping track of it all, managing it, keeping track of upgrades, and so on. Once you start to figure out all the hard and soft costs, you should really be wondering if it is worth the effort and if there is a better way.

Even when using a traditional desktop-as-a-service provider, if you need virtual desktops across multiple regions, the provider has to go through all those same activities, and the cost of managing it all will be passed on to you. If you have any doubts about whether they have the right architecture to handle it, it’s time to schedule a demo with Workspot.

The post The Super Power of Cloud Desktops? Self-Service VDI Elasticity appeared first on Workspot.

Top 3 Questions You Need to Ask

Here are the three questions you should ask of us and any other vendor in the cloud desktop service / desktop as a service (DaaS) space.

Is Your DaaS Cloud-Native?

Is Your DaaS Edge-Native?

When your DaaS solution is “edge-native” that’s how you can get better-than-physical-PC performance; doesn’t everyone want that? From power users to task workers and every other type of worker, no one wants to wait for their computer to respond. Latency in a one-data-center-on-premises-VDI-world is a productivity killer. Why would that ever be OK when there’s an alternative? Well, we can declare the days of the single data center over. Now you have 54 and counting, at least when we’re talking about Microsoft Azure you do. 54+ data centers is probably a good number for now, right? That gives you an immediate global presence if you need it, and if you don’t, that’s fine too. You just place your cloud desktops and GPU workstations in the Azure region or regions close to your users where ever they are, and they are likely going to see less than 50ms latency (way less). That is super fast! Is there any other way to achieve this? Quite simply, no. Check out our more detailed blog on the value of edge-native DaaS – it’s all about performance (and productivity!)!

Is Your DaaS 1st Party Turnkey?

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The Data Center Architecture

Most legacy software was built for one customer and for one data center. ISVs focused on making the software as scalable as possible within one data center. Typically, a G2000 company would run 3-4 copies of the solution stack –  across North America, EMEA, and APAC – to deliver the best possible performance to users throughout their widely distributed organization.

Legacy software was built for one data center

 The Cloud is Not Just One Data Center

When we think of the cloud, we often think of it as a singular object: A data center that is run by someone else.

The cloud is often misunderstood as a single data center, operated by someone else

In reality however, the public cloud is tens of data centers distributed across the world and connected by high-performance networking. Today Microsoft Azure has 54 cloud regions worldwide.

The public cloud consists of tens of data centers, with Microsoft Azure at 54+

It stands to reason that legacy software that was designed for one data center and operated with great difficulty in three to four data centers is not suitable for a world with 54+ data centers. Why does that matter? The availability of 54+ Azure regions means you have 54 data centers available to you, and legacy software can’t take your business where it needs to go.

Legacy VDI was Designed for One Data Center

Legacy VDI has the same architectural limitations. It is difficult for most customers to operate VDI even within a single data center, let alone three or four. So a customer might choose to deploy the VDI stack in just one data center to reduce complexity and management overhead. The problem is that in a larger organization, most users are not close to that data center; they are remote and dependent on high-latency (>100ms) and low bandwidth connections (<5 Mbps). These networks can also have high packet loss which necessitates the use of expensive leased lines.

Users who are remote from the data center experience high-latency and therefore suffer from performance problems

This centralized architecture results in high-latency connections which cause a poor user experience. Over the years, various remoting protocols have been employed to optimize performance, but unfortunately, no one can change the laws of physics. High latencies will always kill performance, and protocol optimizations can only mitigate that so much.

In our experience, most legacy VDI implementations are complex for IT to implement and manage, but even worse, the end users experience slow response times that inhibit productivity.  Users become frustrated and unhappy and that is not a formula for business growth.

VDI for the Cloud Needs a New Architecture

Legacy VDI was architected for one customer, one data center and five thousand users. The Workspot Desktop Cloud service is architected for the edge of the cloud, thousands of customers, hundreds of cloud regions, and millions of users. We had to start from scratch to build a comprehensive, enterprise-ready cloud desktop service using stateless micro-services and messaging architectures. Scalability is the first obvious problem we had to solve with this new architecture, but solving for scalability is more complex than meets the eye; we had to solve it in a distributed fashion that enables virtual desktops at the edge of the cloud. It’s the only solution that supports virtual cloud desktops as a turnkey service, while delivering the agility needed for business growth that has no boundaries.

Workspot scales horizontally across cloud regions for planet-scale deployment

Edge-Native Virtual Desktops

A globally distributed cloud such as Azure needs a globally distributed VDI solution. What if you could use a single pane of glass to deploy desktops to the edge of the cloud region nearest each user? That’s precisely what Workspot’s innovative, “edge of the cloud” architecture enables: Edge-native virtual desktops.

Workspot enables every customer to deploy a cloud desktop which has been built from your corporate image and inherits all your established security and networking policies, including MFA. It is managed just like your physical PCs, using your standard enterprise tools – such as SCCM.

With 54+ Azure regions (and counting), now many users can be less than 25ms away from their cloud desktop. They are often connected using a super-fast (>10Mbps) local internet connection. Think about it: If you can watch a Netflix movie on your tablet, then you’ll probably see great performance using your cloud desktop.

Many users can now be 25ms or less away from their cloud desktop

Making it Real – Edge of the Cloud Deployment

Let’s get real; here’s what happens in an actual customer scenario when the virtual desktop solution can take advantage of an edge-of-the cloud deployment. In this case the customer has a data center on the West Coast of the US where they run client server applications that are core to the business. A physical PC user in the Far East is experiencing over 500 ms latency over slow, expensive leased lines. In a Workspot-enabled, edge-of-the-cloud deployment, that user can now access an edge-native virtual desktop sitting in an Azure cloud region that is 25ms away and be connected over the Azure 30Gbps backbone all the way back to the US West Azure region. From there, the corporate data center is just a fast hop over an Azure ExpressRoute connection. The end result is faster, lower latency connections. Our customers have told us they see better-than-physical-PC performance.

Workspot edge-native virtual desktops often deliver better-than-physical-PC performance

Get Ready – for Just About Anything!

Back to our initial question: “How many data centers do you have?”? The answer – 54 –  is the number of Azure regions as of early 2019. However, the answer is going to be a much larger number in a few years! Imagine how well you can serve your users and the business with that many “data centers”! Imagine the business agility that comes with being able to spin up native-edge virtual desktops in minutes, anywhere in the world. Are you making technology choices that can accelerate company growth? At Workspot, we know where our towel is, and that means you can be confident about our technology, our business model and our absolute commitment to your success.

The post Edge-Native Virtual Desktops: It’s All About Performance! appeared first on Workspot.

(1) Our company has a cloud-first mandate: IT cannot deploy on-prem solutions unless a cloud service does not exist.

(2) We are looking for a cloud-native VDI/DaaS solution to give us flexibility and agility.

(3) We are intrigued by Workspot because we believe you are the only enterprise-class, cloud-native VDI/DaaS solution.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard “we want out of the data center business” during conversations with CIOs, I’d be writing this blog from my yacht on the French Riviera. As IT leaders fulfill their cloud-first mandates, implementing virtual desktops is an obvious move because the right solution enables business agility and therefore, new opportunities that just have not been possible before, and that drives growth. What makes Workspot’s solutions cloud-native, and why that matters, is a very important topic to fully understand because it’s about business agility and business growth.  Let’s talk about why a cloud-native Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution matters for the business, then we’ll drill down on the differences between the four approaches to implementing virtual desktops. Next week we’ll talk about why cloud-native DaaS matters for IT.

Value of Cloud-Native DaaS to Business

I’ll step through the some of the details of the four approaches, but first, here’s the bottom line for the business: A cloud-native VDI/DaaS solution needs to deliver fast time to value and business agility.  You should be able to get your first desktop in days or a week (depending on how busy your IT folks are) – not months, and definitely not years. You should be able to start small – let’s say 50 users. Then you should be able to grow (or shrink) the number of desktops on-demand, sometimes in minutes, and sometimes in a few days depending on the situation, but definitely not months! A globally scalable architecture brings new levels of business agility, and that drives business growth.

Additionally, one of the biggest challenges with legacy VDI and legacy DaaS is end-user performance. Unlike these legacy solutions, the right cloud-native architecture will enable you to place your desktops in a cloud region close to each end user wherever they are in the world. Thus your users will get great performance because latency is negligible in most cases, and that means improved productivity. Finally, a cloud-native DaaS solution should be available anywhere on the planet, and you should make no compromises when it comes to performance and security.

Legacy VDI/Legacy DaaS On-Premises

Legacy on-prem VDI compared to Legacy Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS)

Having laid that foundation, here’s what the stack for each legacy solution looks like. The best way to think about legacy VDI is that it is a do-it-yourself toolkit. You buy a VDI broker/provisioning engine, servers, storage, networking, and monitoring tools, and then you hire consultants to design and/or build the solution stack. In the legacy, on-prem VDI model, you need to do all the planning for the final, production deployment upfront. And all of this is done in the context of one data center because that is how these solutions are architected. You spend a bunch of time understanding the final deployment scale, architecting the solution for that scale, then requisitioning the infrastructure (software, servers, storage, networking, thin clients) required for deployment-at-scale. The up-front financial commitment is large and rigid. If you end up deploying to fewer users than originally planned, you will have wasted quite a bit of money on extra infrastructure. Historically, many legacy VDI projects were over-provisioned, because once they were deployed, users bearing the brunt of slow performance made their dissatisfaction known, and the projects would be scaled back significantly. In those rare instances when the project ended up requiring more infrastructure, you would be forced into conducting an expensive re-architecture and increasing your CapEx budget. With the legacy VDI model, you are responsible for the SLA of the service. If the virtual desktop is unavailable, you are responsible for all the troubleshooting; you have to determine whether it’s the software, the servers, the storage, or the network. This often leads to multiple problems where the server team, the storage team, the networking team, and the end user team all become involved in identifying which component has failed, and what to do about it. Oh, now you want VDI in a second data center? See above: Repeat. Yes, it’s really complex. But the worst thing is this complexity and rigidity actually inhibits business growth.

In legacy DaaS, a service provider delivers the virtual desktop service and takes responsibility for the SLA of the service. However, the service provider is essentially using the same single-tenant, single data-center VDI broker architecture to deliver the service. The architectural limitations of the underlying solution are still present and they still constrain many aspects of the service being delivered. It’s just that you’ve transferred ownership of all the complexity to someone else. All of the problems associated with a single-tenant, single data center architecture remain, and the performance problems that are intrinsic to this architecture remain as well. Plus, you can bet that all of the work that goes into maintaining and troubleshooting this infrastructure gets passed along to you in the form of service fees. The complexity is the same, it’s just someone else’s problem, although the resulting rigidity is still very much your problem, because that’s where you are limiting business growth opportunities.

Legacy VDI in the Cloud (aka Control-Plane-As-a-Service)

 Legacy on-prem VDI, Legacy DaaS & Control-Plane-As-a-Service Compared

Let’s add in “Control-Plane-As-a-Service” to the picture. This is what it looks like when vendors take their legacy solution and “cloud-enable” it.  That’s a very different thing than being cloud-native, and in the era of massively scalable cloud solutions, that’s where the rubber meets the road, because only one of them is massively scalable. Also known as “Control Plane As-a-Service”, this approach uses someone else’s infrastructure (i.e. public cloud infrastructure), but you still have to implement and manage all the components of legacy VDI. It’s exactly like on-prem VDI, but you implement all the piece-parts on public cloud infrastructure. It’s the same single tenant, one-data center architecture that got dropped into a public cloud region, whether that’s Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services. The key point is that you have to duplicate the control plane and all those VDI piece-parts into every, single cloud region in which you want to deploy virtual desktops. That takes a ton of IT resources to implement and manage on an ongoing basis. Same complexity, same rigidity, same lack of business agility. Why would you do that?

Cloud-Native DaaS Drives Business Growth: That’s Workspot!

Legacy on-prem VDI, Legacy DaaS, Control-Plane-As-a-Service and Cloud-Native DaaS Compared

Cloud-native DaaS is green because green is good!  With Workspot Desktop Cloud and Workstation Cloud, you’re subscribing to a turnkey service for delivery of your virtual desktops. You don’t mess with all the piece-parts at all. We do it for you. Enterprise architects tell us that these are the things they expect from a cloud-native DaaS solution so they can deliver value to the business:

• Fast time-to-value
• On-demand scalability
• High availability
• Pricing that supports their business model
• Globally available
• Performance that makes users happy
• Easily supports new use cases

All of these requirements impact business agility and productivity; they are exactly the right things to expect, and only a cloud-native DaaS solution can deliver them. Workspot supports cloud-first mandates, eliminates the complexity of legacy solutions, solves notorious performance problems, and brings new levels of security, flexibility, innovation, and agility to the business. That all adds up to a formula for accelerating business growth! To see for yourself how it works, schedule a demo with us and we can talk through your unique requirements.

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