A couple of months ago I wrote about how Liquidware and Microsoft’s WVD (Windows Virtual Desktop) are better together, read more here. Today I’d like to talk a bit on how Liquidware solutions help in transitioning to the new WVD offering, including the on boarding process as well as continues management and monitoring once in production.
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of months, Microsoft announced their new Windows Virtual Desktop offering (part of Microsoft 365 licensing) a couple of months ago – back in September 2018, to be exact. One of the partners mentioned is Liquidware, an important one.
With Liquidware, interested parties will have all the tools needed to evaluate, size, plan, onboard, monitor, and manage existing and new users to the, soon to be launched Windows Virtual Desktop on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud.
Liquidware portfolio consists out of Stratusphere UX, ProfileUnity, and FlexApp, just in case you didn’t know already.
Existing and new
Like with every work-space, or desktop transition you will have to deal with new as well as existing users. Even though the WVD will be a fully managed service as far as all back-end components are concerned, the base image, holding your applications, plug-ins, the OS, and all other related software is still something you will need to take care of yourself – or have a technology partner take care of this for you. Also, when provisioning your WVD machines, knowing how much and the type of Azure storage you need by forehand will further smoothen the entire process.
The same holds true for your users, by the way. If you have an idea of how your users behave throughout the week this will help in assigning proper resources.
This Stratusphere UX comes in.
Liquidware Stratusphere UX gathers and provides key user experience metrics to support design of desktop images and infrastructure on WVD on Azure. Key diagnostics ensure that the highest fidelity desktops are provided to users based on their requirements, whether task workers or professional/power users. In short, making life a lot easier.
Onboarding new users is easy. They have no history, user profiles, no documents or other data. That’s why this is often called a utopia, it’s unlikely to happen. Unless existing users start all over, of course. It happens. However, in most cases you will already have some sort of (virtual) workspace solution in place. VDI, RDSH, or something alike perhaps. Whatever the case may be, your users will have some data and existing user profiles at the very least.
This is where ProfileUnity comes in.
Liquidware ProfileUnity can harvest current user profiles and applications (data) to prepare for a smooth migration to Microsoft WVD. Administrators can orchestrate workspace changes from one central management console. ProfileUnity offers features that support ongoing management of user profiles, policies, user-authored data and cloud storage.
This solution also allows users to co-exist and move across physical, virtual, RDS, and mixed Windows OS (Windows 7, Windows 10, Windows 10 multi-user virtualization, RDS, Server 2016) environments with ease – back and forth. Additional features boost desktop security with policy management, application restriction, blacklisting and white-listing, granular or complete desktop lock-down and privilege elevation.
As you might know, ProfileUnity also fully supports native Azure Blob storage (among others) – as does FlexApps This way, your application (layers) and user data can be stored directly in Azure (Blob) storage. Close to your WVD machines, users, and without the overhead of additional (SMB) Windows Server machines.
Eventually you’ll end up in ‘production’. Now you would like to monitor how your users are doing, or better yet, how they experience their WVD’s – in other words, end user monitoring. Preferably you would like to be able to act proactively. Again, this is where Stratusphere comes into play.
However, ProfileUnity also still plays an important role at this stage. As highlighted above,
it’s not just the user profile that gets managed, it’s much more (desktop security with policy management, application restriction, blacklisting and whitelisting, granular or complete desktop lockdown and privilege elevation).
Well, that about sums it up for now. If you would like to know more, the fine folks over at Liquidware will be more than happy to answer any questions you might have. Or, have a look at there website (s) hereand here.
Liquidware expands
For my BeNeLux readers, Liquidware has expanded substantially throughout the last couple of months. The team has welcomed: Kaymar Nezam, Key Account Manager, Perparim Bislimi and Robert Versteeg, both fulfilling the role of Solutions Architect. They also recently partnered with Prianto with which they will further develop and ‘build’ their partner channel as part of their ‘Optimal Enduser Experience’ program. Advantages include, but are not limited to extended sales as well as technical support.
