Posted by Ron Oglesby on Thu, Aug 26, 2010 @ 11:01 AM
I've been spending the last few weeks at customer sites helping our partners implement Unidesk. It's good to be in the field again participating in production VDI deployments. No surprise I end up getting involved in more than just Unidesk design - network, storage, thin clients, brokers, hypervisors, you name it. But that's for another blog.
What I'm finding is that a key to successful virtual desktop deployments, whether on an end point device or in the data center, is personalization. Personalization is what allows the user to “feel” like the desktop is theirs. It allows them to modify the desktop, make changes they need or just plain want, make it USEFUL to them, and really make it work for them. Without this personalization, VDI is just a bunch of little Terminal Servers.
So what is “personalization?" IT has been taught to think that personalization is simply the stuff that's captured with roaming profiles or a profile management tool. So that's become part of the VDI recipe. But if roaming profiles were the key to all personalization problems, we would all use them and the debate would be over and VDI would not be having the problems it has today.
Certainly, the data and configurations stored within a Windows profile are PART of the personalization for that user or virtual machine. But that's not full personalization. True personalization often varies by the customer but in the end it generally means, as one administrator just explained to me, “if they can do it on a desktop they have, they want to do it on the virtual desktop I provide.”
With this in mind I would like to share a couple of VDI user stories that describe some lesser recognized parts of personalization that go beyond profiles and even user-installed applications.
A university customer I recently met with told me that one of the primary problems they had in their VDI environment was print drivers. Thousands of new users arrive any given year and many of them bring printers with them (the one Mom and Dad picked up at Target for $50 just before Junior left for college - you have that driver in your image right?). In his VDI environment, he has to constantly update his Gold Image to ensure it has the right hot fixes and service packs. After he finishes these Gold updates and fields a slew of "my printer disappeared" calls from his users, he gets the users to do a printer reinstall, and everything is ok until the next Gold Image update.
Another VDI customer explained his personalization problem with a security program. When the software gets installed on the desktop, it ties the assigned user and the virtual machine together by linking the Active Directory user account with a security key fob. The issue is that in using a pooled provisioning / gold image model to allow for centralized updates, the security keys generated for all of this Machine-User-Key linking are lost whenever a new image is pushed out. The user is linked to the machine, so profiles and shell folder redirection do essentially nothing for this customer. The only answer for them (well, now there's Unidesk) is to thick-provision the VM, eat the cost, and lose the single image management functionality.
Personalization takes on many forms. Profiles. User-installed applications. Browser plug-ins. Printer drivers. Security keys. We as IT professionals have to consider the users we're trying to serve with virtual desktops, understand their needs, and figure out how to meet them, rather than just go with what we're told is the standard VDI "stack."
To realize the promise of VDI, we need to provide users with a persistent virtual desktop that is THEIRS and can be customized by them, but can still be managed as a single image. Full persistent personalization, not profile management, is the way to achieve this.
More real-world VDI learnings to come.
-Ron Oglesy
Unidesk Chief Solution Architect
Posted by Ross Guida on Fri, Aug 20, 2010 @ 10:31 PM
Twelve weeks ago I began my MBA summer internship working at Unidesk as one of the company's marketing managers.
I quickly set to work and found - just as I'd hoped - that I enjoy the fast-paced environment of a software startup. But for the first few weeks the fact that I was working on a VDI desktop created and updated by Unidesk went largely unnoticed by me. Sure, the petite thin client with no local CPU was a reminder, but I found myself seamlessly installing applications, editing my profile, saving data locally, and doing all the things I normally do on a physical PC - forgetting I had gone virtual.
This was great from an end user standpoint, but since my goal in this position was to market Unidesk to IT people, I wanted to experience the desktop management side of Unidesk. I set out to accomplish this by cornering Chad, Unidesk's IT guru.
We made the appointment and Chad swiftly and easily demonstrated the options available: Roll my program installations back a week without affecting my data, add or remove any software I desired, including our sales team's suite of programs, or apply the latest Windows 7 patches, all with minimal effort.
Experiencing both perspectives made me realize that the flexibility and power Unidesk offers as a virtual desktop management platform is not just about simplifying the management of the OS and applications for IT; it’s also about bringing a quality experience to the sophisticated end user to drive user acceptance and adoption.
After a summer of firsthand experience with this product I realized that Unidesk's brand mantra of Storage, Personalization, and Management fits the product to a "T" and made my job of marketing it more streamlined and straightforward - because Unidesk is truly that good.
For a technical demonstration of how all this works visit our Webinar sign-up page, where you can attend a session and experience one of Ron Oglesby's famed Unidesk demos.
As for me, I'm headed back for my final year of my MBA program - but not before I attend VMworld 2010 in San Fran with my Unidesk colleagues. Hope to see you there!
-Ross Guida
Unidesk Marketing Manager
Posted by Tom Rose on Thu, Aug 05, 2010 @ 05:48 PM
The weeks since Unidesk 1.0 launch have been busy, as a number of our Beta testers became our first customers. But our business is based on delivering our software through our solution partners, so it has been exciting to see them ramp their selling efforts, and offer Unidesk as the management platform for virtual desktops accessed through VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop, Pano Logic and other connection brokers.
We'd like to recognize four of our solution partners in particular, who have now closed their first Unidesk customers and have many more opportunities pending - without assistance from us! Cambridge Computer, Data Connections, ICI, and INX assessed their customers' virtual desktop requirements, determined that Unidesk is the best solution for reducing VDI costs, simplifying desktop management, and delivering the user experience required to satisfy their customers' VDI use cases, presented Unidesk, and won the business. Awesome!
Why are our joint VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft partners promoting Unidesk for their VDI projects? To quote the virtualization practice lead at one:
"Unidesk has many attributes, but the ones I like the best include:
- Full user personalization – even letting users install applications!
- Application packaging & delivery
- Operating system rollback
- Enables rollback of user applications without loss of data
- Can enable View/XenDesktop to work at branches over low bandwidth scenarios by replicating to local servers but still providing centralized management.
- Integrates with existing virtualization infrastructure. Unidesk does not include it’s own connection broker, but will work with View, Pano (or, of course, with both) or Citrix as long as vSphere is available on the back-end."
Congratulations to Cambridge Computer, Data Connections, ICI, and INX. We greatly valued their product feedback during Unidesk Beta, we appreciate their advocacy and selling efforts now that Unidesk 1.0 is generally available, and we look forward to helping them make VDI successful now that we have shared customers.
-Tom Rose
Unidesk Chief Marketing Officer
Posted by Tom Rose on Wed, Jun 16, 2010 @ 01:12 PM
Last year, I attended my first Briforum and blogged about the experience. I closed by saying I couldn't wait until Briforum 2010, when we would return as a sponsor and demo how Unidesk transforms VDI with clear ROI and greater user acceptance. As you can see below, we kept our promise!
Feedback from the team is that we're getting the usual big crowds around our booth (#201). All want to see demos of how our desktop layering technology improves the VDI user experience by sustaining all user personalization (yes, even user-installed applications), makes O/S and application updates effortless, and shrinks storage use.
Also at the event, our very own Ron Oglesby will discuss the issues that need to be addressed to unlock widespread virtual desktop adoption in his breakout session “Server Virtualization – Success! VDI – Not so Much. Why VDI Adoption Has Been Slow and How Desktop Virtualization Will Change the Future.” If you're at the event and don't plan to stay out late at a Chicago jazz club (or somewhere else), check him out Thursday morning at 8:30am CT.
We'll also be giving away another iPad, so stay tuned! We'll be announcing the winner right here on our blog.
-Tom Rose
Unidesk CMO