Recently I was privileged to have the chance in sharing another VMware VDI success story. Sumit Sehgal joined me to share his experiance's and success deploying a VMware VDI based solution at Riverside Medical Center. This continues the trend of VMware VDI success in the Health Care space as the increased flexibility and mobility provided by VDI benifits Doctors and Nurses across the globe.

Here are some of my favorite highlights:

VDI Client Devices - Once again, repuroposed PC's leads the charge. Riverside started down their VDI path converting existing PC's into VDI clients using a PXE booted image from the network. As the PC's are decommissioned they are replaced with thin clients .

Time Savings - Avg. time to deploy a new VDI desktop 20 minutes compared to 120 minutes in the Past.

Faster Recovery From Failures - Recently a blade power supply failure resulted in the disruption of 32 virtual desktops. With the implementation of VMware HA these virtual desktops were back up and running in 4 min 33 sec. That was faster than Sumit was able to remotely connect once he received the notification or the failure.

Cost Savings - Expected a 6-9 VM per core consolidation. Acheived 11-12. Reprovisioned old PC's as thin clients eliminating traditional desktop lifecycle. Labor costs reduced by improved process.

In addition to these highlights Sumit shares with us some of his real world experiance regarding their storage design. In addition he highlights how they were able to leverage memory over-commit to increase the overall consolidation ratio. The entire webinar can be found here.

Riverside Medical Center Saves Time and Money on PC management with VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

From there search for Riverside Medical

I was so slammed at VMworld over the last week that I have not had the
time to let everyone know the Beta 1 for VDM 2.0 is now available.

VDM 2.0 is a session broker for VDI deployments offered by VMware and is a new product built from the Propero technology we acquired back in April of this year. Over the last few months the team has been hard at work so we can deliver on the design goals we set for this release of the broker. At this stage we are really focused on simplicity and saleability. One of the biggest changes for the initial release from the original Propero technolog wasporting to Windows. This release is only supported on Windows 2003.

Technically, there are a lot of things that occur when VDM 2.0 is installed, but we have simplified that process in the installation procedure. The installation is a single MSI installer. It takes about five minutes to get the initial VDM server in a group installed and ready to configure using the web based administration. In the coming weeks I will be sharing more on the architecture and available features. Anyone thats interested in
participating in the beta can find the registration page this URL - VDM 2.0 Press Release

Last week I had the privilege of doing a joint webinar with one of our first VDI customers, Cardinal Health. I was joined by Justin Hooper, Director of Windows Systems at Cardinal Health. Cardinal Health is the largest worldwide provider of health care solutions, with over 40,000 employees. They are global in nature and are recognized by Fortune Magazine as one of America’s Most Admired Companies.

Cardinal Health was an early adopter of VDI and selected VDI from VMware to support and deliver the desktop infrastructure of two mission critical call centers. At the time, there still was not a lot of information available regarding the architectural choices and deployment practices of VDI based solutions. Justin and his team did a tremendous job of being innovative in order to design a solution that meets the business requirements of Cardinal Health. One of the most innovative things I
feel they accomplished was in how they executed their client side strategy. After evaluating different alternatives from PC’s to thin clients.

They decided to go with low-end PC’s. Because VDI was new at the time, Justin’s team had to create their own custom image. The image is PXE booted from the network by each of the client end points. In essence this enabled them to create their own low cost unmanaged client end point. When a device is powered on it downloads its image from the network. Once the boot process is complete, the user is given a chooser created by Justin’s team for selecting the environment they need. Once the user has made their selection, a connection is established to their hosted virtual desktop.

Simple, clean and affective. This client side approach is also an effective way for organizations to move to a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure today, while still leveraging the existing investment in desktop hardware they might have. In addition, it provides a clean and effective migration path to adopting alternative client devices such as thin clients, once the PC investment has depreciated. In this webinar Justin shares with us the architectural details and lessons learned from their
deployment. The webinar can be found at the following location, Select recorded webinars and its listed on page 2:

Cardinal Health’s Call Center PC Virtualization with VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure VDI

Last week I was in Japan meeting with the local VMware teams, customers and partners. One of the highlights of my trip was getting the chance to catch up with a great VDI partner NEC. NEC was one of the early partners who joined the VDI Alliance, and was one of the first too launch an end to end VDI solution leveraging VMware's VI3. At VMworld last year, NEC announced their VPCCsolution which was one of the first end to end VDI solutions that offered everything from client to storage. In addition, it was the first solution offering a solution that addresses Multimedia performance issues often found with SBC and thin client solutions.

Their efforts included working with other leading technology providers in the industry and resulted in the first thin client device and software that enables multimedia formats to be decoded on the client side rather than the server side. Because their thin client device, the US100 is a thin-os device. There is little too no management required when compared to other devices that run an embedded OS. Therefore, you end up with the best of both worlds in a client device that requires no management, but can also deliver a PC like multimedia experience. Another feature of the VPCC solution is the tight integration with their IP Telephony products.

The VPCC solution is packaged to fully support the NEC VoIP offerings as well. Not only is this bundling unique but the multimedia integration with the US100 is as well. All the the voice traffic is decoded on the US100 device further reducing any server side decode required. The VPCC solution also comes with its own connection broker that is integrated with the NEC Sigma System Center server management software. One of the features I like most is the ability to do patch management of virtual desktop OS for simplifying patch management. If you are looking for a fully integrated end to end VDI solution you should check out the NEC VPCC offering. If you have never been to Japan, you will find that everyone is very polite. I also find it very service oriented . The food, as expected was also great. Lost of Sashimi!

Here is a nice view of Tokyo from the current VMware office.

VPCC

Here is another nice view of Tokyo

Dinner - Good Sashimi!

http://bp2.blogger.com/_mwnQG3BGo10/RmSG9CtQeaI/AAAAAAAAAA8/UIANP6mYJhw/s1600-h/P1030417.JPG

VMware is a great place to work. Smart people, everyone’s on the go, lots of perks, lots of fun blah, blah, blah. However, the downside is it seems everyone is always sick. I work remotely from my home office and travel back and forth from Palo Alto. Everyday several times a day I see messages with Subject lines: Going
home not feeling good. Going home STILL not feeling good. WFH Today - open the message - sick!

My favorite's are the ones sent BEFORE they have come in and contaminated the office. At first, I thought these email messages were just standing out. That
was until after my first few trips . People walking around coughing, sneezing, red noses everywhere tissue rags in pockets, book bags, meeting tables, purses, over flowing trash cans. Don't get me wrong, I am the furthest thing from a germ-a-fobe. I felt like I was suck in the middle of a mine field and anything I touched was a flirtation with a weeks worth of misery. Someone tell these people to go home! I have had Bronchitis and the Flu since Friday. Proudly, I picked it up
the week before in Palo Alto. Two weeks before earlier, I had a cold, I had pick up out there as well. With the technology we have today, there is NO reason anyone needs to be in an office if they are even remotely contagious.

VDI can help with this, by remotely accessing your Virtual Desktop securely, you have access to all your stuff and your infestations stay at home. On to the good stuff, March 26th! ACE Beta 3 has gone live! If you have not already registered and want to start kicking the tires, you can register here. It’s really coming together. I have only been glancing at it, as I am still a little cross eyed but, it looks good. A new toolbar button for creating Pocket ACE packages. I also noticed you can now also associate managed ACE's to a new server now as well as a nice status notification when one is trying to contact the management server all really good
stuff and more to come before GA!

Ok, I finally FORCED myself to start blogging again. Last December, I embarked on a new and exciting phase of my career. I was fortunate enough that the Enterprise Desktop and Solutions product team at VMware asked me to join their team, a really smart and talented team of people by the way. Since that time, I have been sucking from a fire hose and trying to get my legs. Pictures of Bambi on ice seem to play through my head.

The level of activity and the amount of work too be done is a bit overwhelming but, I would want it no other way. I simply have not had the time to get this blog going. Between upcoming product launches, writing white papers, setting up labs and traveling to meet with customers, it's been crazy. I also was having trouble coming up with a name for my blog. I wanted to keep my former blog name Ponder This but because VMware does not have an internal blog server today, that was becoming harder to do. I also did not want to do something lame and play-off something else and use a name like Think Virtual. Sorry, that's an inside joke.

As I struggled to come up with a catchy phrase. I decided I would play a little game. Call it what it is, a blog about Virtual Desktops. What is a Virtual Desktop? My vision is it's an evolution. It's an evolution that includes best of breed technologies and architectures from the past, today and future, which are coming together and changing the way we use desktop computing today. The "desktop" is often referred to as physical device. IMO that's not a desktop, that's a Personal Computer, simply a device that is running a users desktop environment. This desktop evolution has been occurring for some time. It all started with WIMP . Virtual Desktops have existed at the desktop for a long time, primarily in UNIX like systems. Never really main stream in Windows.

This creates a unique challenge as something like 98% of the desktop market is Windows based and the largest population of users has never been exposed to dynamic flexible desktop environments. Most will only start to get exposed as they are introduced to Windows Vista. Besides the Virtual Desktop evolving at the UI level, there is also an infrastructure or delivery evolution that has been occurring and is entering a new phase driven most recently by VDI . The infrastructure and delivery evolution is a combination of Network Clients, Server Based Computing, Virtualization and Application Streaming technologies that I believe we will start to see merge together as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

So what's the game, in what's a name? It's not really a game but more of a test. We have an awesome team that is handling the blogsphere at VMware. I am amazed by the amount of content they find and aggregate. I just wanted to see how long it would take for them to find this. If you have a better name please fee free to share it. In the end I figured it really did not matter.