Enterprise Mobility Management: VMware

Magnetic Island. Did you just go on a mini-vacation in your head? Not so fast. To demonstrate how easy it now is to work from anywhere, VMware recently sent Lifehacker Australia’s Angus Kidman to Magnetic Island to see if he could do his regular job using VMware Horizon 6. For those who didn’t see it, go VMware.

Marketing campaigns aside, should VMware Horizon, as part of VMware’s Workspace Suite, be part of your Enterprise Mobility Management kit?

Recently announced, Workspace Suite consists of Horizon desktop virtualisation, Workspace Portal, AirWatch mobile device management and Secure Content Locker.

Horizon 6 offers application virtualisation and virtual desktops in a single product, simplifying management and administration. It offers central image management for physical, virtual, and BYO devices.

A major benefit of Horizon 6 is its use of virtualised storage area networking technology, which eliminates one of the downsides of the virtual desktop approach to enterprise mobility – the cost of the large amounts of storage required to host end user desktops.

It’s fully scalable across even the largest enterprises, as with its ‘cloud pod’ functionality it supports spanning across multiple datacentres, providing dynamic resources allocation of storage, compute power and networking.

VMware has paid attention to the user experience too, with 3D graphics capabilities that are enhanced to augment a graphically rich user experience. Using Virtual Dedicated Graphics Acceleration (vDGA), a single virtual machine is mapped to one physical graphics processing unit (GPU) in the ESXi host, providing high-end, hardware-accelerated workstation graphics.

Now, onto other elements of the suite.

Workspace Portal offers a customisable Enterprise App Store, providing users with access to thousands of applications including web/SAML, remote Windows applications, packaged Windows application delivery and hosted desktops.

Full Active Directory (AD) integration allows administrators to provision and de-provision users and entitlements by workspace users and groups or AD groups, while engagement and application usage reporting provides full details about license consumption and compliance.

AirWatch delivers enterprise-grade security policies and data loss prevention, with AD/LDAP, Kerberos, token and certificate-based authentication methods. Content is encrypted in-transit, in use and at-rest.

With Secure Content Locker, administrators can restrict viewing, cut/copy/paste, print and email for advanced data protection. A range of collaboration tools (with Outlook integration) further contribute to workplace productivity.

This solution is right for organisations that are…

If you’re already using VMware products for virtualisation, and/or are looking to move from your reactive ‘point solutions’ approach to enterprise mobility to a considered, simple to manage, unified strategy, the Workspace Suite is right for you.

How it’s licensed

The applications can be licensed individually or under a per-user licence for the suite.

There are different Horizon 6 products – Standard, Advanced and Enterprise – which offer various levels of management support and automation. Which is most suitable for you depends on your immediate and medium term goals. Data^#3 consultants can help you work out the right product mix and deployment program.

Business outcomes

You will achieve business productivity gains for your users, based on their streamlined access to business systems and data from a range of devices, anywhere, while at the same time, you protect against enterprise security vulnerabilities from unmanaged devices and ad hoc security policies.

Single sign-on to Windows, web and SaaS applications supports users, while features such as data ‘sandboxing’ allow you to separately manage user and business data on BYO devices, with remote wipe of business data available for lost or stolen devices, or when an employee leaves the organisation.

Supporting the Enterprise Mobility pillars

Data^#3 and VMware

Data^#3 is a VMware Premier Partner and delivers comprehensive VMware-based solutions that encompass software, infrastructure, and people. Data^#3 also offers cloud-hosted VMware solutions from our datacentres nationally.