Quest vWorkspace 7.2 - certification

Last week I followed the 4-day training (and passed the exam afterwards) and became Quest vWorkspace certified. For those who never heard of the product, a quick introduction:

“…Quest vWorkspace manages, secures and provisions virtual desktop environments as well as brokers connections. It delivers virtual applications and desktops from multiple hypervisors, Remote Desktop Session Hosts (Terminal Servers) and blade PCs through a single user access point and management center, while increasing user adoption with an optimal user experience…”

For more info see here: http://www.quest.com/vworkspace/

Although parts of the product contain some similarities with existing Microsoft products like RD Gateway, RD, WebAccess, RD Easyprint (also see earlier post) and Virtual IP, the vWorkspace (and especially the new release 7.2) has some really interesting features that extend the existing Microsoft technologies and (what I think is important) without completely replacing them!

Being a Microsoft-minded guy I especially like the seamless integration with the Hyper-V platform, Remote Desktop Services (RDSH) and VDI based on Windows 7.

Besides these integrations for managing your virtual environment vWorkspace comes with a lot of features that make the life of a systems administrator much easier. Like for example the ability to extending a users roaming profile with additional folders or regkeys to be saved on central storage upon logoff (MetaProfiles-IT). I think we can all agree that we love RD easyprint, quest vWorkspace takes printing even a bit further with Print-IT because on top of a universal printerdriver it support things like Bandwith Control and data compression split into compression for graphics and text within an single document and it is supported on RDSH (TS) servers as well as VDI.

Using USB-IT vWorkspace enables VDI clients to seamlessly access their USB-based handhelds over RDP connections on the fly, so no need to logoff.

vWorkspace also offers the patent-pending technology, Quest EOP Xtream. It accelerates RDP traffic on wide area networks (WANs). This provides for an improved user experience by providing faster RDP screen responses and improved performance of all EOP features. ( How EOP Xtream in Quest vWorkspace accelerates RemoteFX by 62% )

The 7.2 release can also be used with a first set of Powershell commands. A PowerShell library for vWorkspace is available at http://communities.quest.com/community/vworkspace

Since 7.2 they’ve also extended the logging capabilities by adding a logging feature into a separate database that holds all history about what happened when. There is a Quest logging interface to view reports based on SQL queries, but you can easily connect thing like SQL Server reporting services to it to generate those reports that CEO’s tend to like.

I’ve had the pleasure to take the course and play with vWorkspace in a Quest lab environment to get a good feeling with all the features. I will be setting up a demo environment myself as well to test it a bit more thoroughly and might devote some more posts on this.

For more general info also see:

general vWorkspace info:
http://www.quest.com/vworkspace/
The vWorkspace community forum:
http://communities.quest.com/community/vworkspace
Info about the new 7.2 release:
http://www.quest.com/vworkspace/new-release.aspx