eWeek Reviews Connection Broker 6.3

Cameron Sturdevant, director of the eWeek Test Labs, recently tested Connection Broker 6.3. Sturdevant found that "the Leostream Connection Broker fits into the broader VDI implementation as a virtually transparent facilitator for end-user access. For desktop administrators, it is a powerful ally in melding policy, usage and authorized access in a single, easily managed tool."

Speaking about the reasonably complex process of setting up VDI in general, he continues: "desktops and desktop template systems in my VMware vSphere environment must be identified, users must be authenticated, and a variety of policies governing persistence and maintenance must be defined. While there are a lot of policies and procedural decisions that must be crafted in the Leostream Connection Broker, they are not extraordinarily more involved than what would be needed in a stand-alone implementation of VMware View 4 or a Citrix environment."

"The amount of setup and policy development time has almost nothing to do with technology and everything to do with 1) the highly personalized nature of desktop systems and 2) the fact that life cycle issues - which are easy to ignore in server virtualization - are front and center for virtual desktop implementations. The Leostream Connection Broker makes it fairly easy to translate the intensely important questions of what happens to a virtual desktop when a user is finished with it for the day into actionable policy. I was able to easily assign persistent desktops to high-value users while pools of desktops used by routine knowledge workers were reverted to a pristine snapshot at the end of the day.

Read the eWeek Review of Connection Broker 6.3 Here

View the eWeek Slideshow of 6.3 in Action Here

Leading Global Financial Services Firms Deploy Leostream for VDI Success at Scale, in Production

We recently announced that four of the world's largest financial institutions have used the Connection Broker to deploy large-scale hosted virtual desktop infrastructure (HVDI). This story shows how these organizations scaled their HVDI effectively and overcame a wide range of challenges, including delivering a uniform end-user experience across disparate environments, data loss prevention, enablement of unique remote access capabilities, and maximizing the ROI of existing technology investments.

Four banks and investment firms are profiled, some of which are using Leostream to provide remote desktop access to more than 10,000 users. The profiles show Leostream integration capabilities for widely heterogeneous technologies, including Sun ALP/SRSS, Citrix XenApp, Linux, and VMware.

Read the Leostream Financial Services Press Release Here

Portugal Telecom Deploys 5,000 User VDI Environment

Portugal Telecom (PT), the largest telecommunications provider in Portugal, with additional operations in Europe, South America, Africa, and the Caribbean, recently deployed the Connection Broker to connect 5,000 end-users at its call centers to virtual desktops.

Based on the success of this deployment, PT turned to a hosted VDI model to solve a problem it was facing in its call centers. These operations have a large number of workers, and head count rises and falls dramatically depending upon marketing campaign activities and support staff requirements. Additionally, when a new marketing campaign is set to launch, IT may only have a week or two to set up hundreds of desktops and perhaps thousands of accounts for the subcontractors who handle the phones.

Leostream now underpins a highly flexible environment that allows PT IT managers to provision and decomission Windows and Linux virtual desktops in hours instead of weeks. PT now plans to extend the solution and replace all of its desktops, eventually covering all 9,000 end-users at the organization in its hosted virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

Read the Portugal Telecom Press Release Here

Download the Portugal Telecom Case Study Here

Virtually Speaking's Dan Kusnetzky on the Protocol Wars

With the advent of soft PCoIP, RemoteFX, HDX/ICA, NoMachine NX, and many others, it seems that every vendor is trumpeting their own viewing protocol as an ideal solution. To be sure, each has advantages and disadvantages, but the truth is, there is no clear, decisive winner among the current vendor offerings. Instead, they offer, at best, two of the following three things:

• Low bandwidth requirements
• Low computational requirements and high scalability
• High quality end-user experience with responsive multimedia

Read More in Dan Kusnetzky's Virtually Speaking Post Here

Leostream Tutorial: Delivering Persistent Desktops and Citrix XenApp Applications

At Leostream, we've recently created a series of detailed implementation guides based on real-world use cases that we see with our customers. You can view the entire collection on the Leostream training page under "Tutorials." We'll present a different one every month for the next few months.

This month we guide you through a Connection Broker setup that uses XenServer, AD, RDP, and ICA to provide end users with a persistent Windows XP desktop and applications published in a Citrix XenApp farm. End users access their desktops and sessions via Wyse V10L thin clients. This tutorial builds an environment similar to that of one of our major financial services customers. It takes a step-by-step approach to using the Connection Broker to build an hosted VDI that meets the following requirements:

We want to know	Here’s what you have
What type of desktops are you managing?	Virtual Machines hosted in Citrix XenServer
What type of desktop pool structure do you want to use?	One pool that contains all the VMs hosted in the XenServer that are running a Microsoft Windows XP operating system
Is this a persistent or non-persistent pool, i.e., should the user be permanently assigned to the desktop after they log in the first time?	Persistent, i.e., When the user first logs in, assign a desktop from the pool. Then, keep the user permanently assigned to that desktop
Are you publishing any applications?	Yes, applications are published in a Citrix XenApp farm
What system do your users authenticate against?	Microsoft Active Directory
What remote viewer protocol will your users use?	Microsoft RDP for the desktops, Citrix ICA for the applications
How is the desktop’s power state managed?	The VMs is always powered on, however a user can manually restart their VM
What client device do users have?	Wyse V10L thin clients (Note: Not all firmware versions of this thin client support the restart option.)

View the Leostream Tutorial Here

Moving to Hosted Virtual Desktops? Learn How to Make the Most of Your Existing IT Investments

The promise of virtualizing end user resources in the data center is tremendous. The potential benefits include:

• Reduced desktop provisioning and management effort
• Hardware independence
• Improved data security and regulatory compliance
• Reduced down time

In order to build a successful hosted infrastructure for desktops and other end user resources, you need to be able to integrate security, network management, and other critical systems into the hosted virtual desktop infrastructure. This short Leostream Whitepaper explains how a vendor-independent, heterogeneous connection management approach is key to making virtual desktops a reality for large, diverse, end-user organizations.

Download the Leostream Whitepaper Here

 Leostream Events

June 15 - 17: Visit Leostream at BriForum in Chicago

Leostream is pleased to be sponsoring BriForum for the second year. We'll be demoing the Connection Broker's advanced integration and management capabilities, and discussing our solutions to real world VDI problems.

BriForm is the leading event for independent, advanced technical information and expert strategies for hosted virtual desktops.

Click Here to Register for BriForum 2010