I have recently worked with one of my colleagues (Josh Herbert) to setup demonstrations of every component of the Horizon Suite for a recent seminar I presented at. We presented the Seminar alongside Peter Von Oven Senior VMware End User Computing Specialist and wanted to ensure that customers not only understood what the Horizon Suite could do for them but also see for them selves in scenario based and hands on demos. The main points we wanted to get across was the fact that VMware did much more than just VDI and that a number of restrictions that have traditionally been around VDI no longer exist.
Regular readers of my blog will have seen my 8U mobile rack that I use for seminars before
For the end user computing seminar the rack was upgraded to incorporate a Dell PowerEdge R720 so we could install the NVIDIA GRID K1 GPU for the 3D demos utilising VMware Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration vSGA. We use a mobile rack to allow us to taken our seminars on tour to various different regions. Also installed in the rack is a R620, Dell EqualLogic Storage and Force10 switching.
We put together a number of demonstrations including utilising a Dell Wyse P45 Teradici Zero Client with 4 screens running 3D CAD demos utilising the NVIDIA GRID K1 card a vSGA, seen in the short video below.
We also had the Dell Wyse P25 the baby brother of the P45, it is also a Teradici Zero client with the ability to run two displays. The demo showed HD video but also the functionality of Horizon Workspace including Horizon Data and Horizon Application management over multiple devices, on display on the day was IOS and Android devices as well as using the Surface RT for web based demos of Horizon Workspace as well as the tech preview for View.
One problem we have been seeing is many customer either have or are looking at investing in Microsoft Lync at present, traditionally using Lync for Video and Voice inside a VDI desktop whilst possible has been unsupported and the results were mixed. With Lync 2013, the Microsoft Lync Plugin for VDI, View 5.2 and a Windows based Thin Client these restrictions can be lifted. To show this we had a live demo between two Wyse WES7 thin clients connected to View desktops taking part in live video calls.
Amongst the other demos we had a live demo of a Windows XP laptop being migrated to a Windows 7 laptop utilising VMware Horizon Mirage, whilst all users data and settings remained intact. Using the same environment we were also able to demonstrate application layering, fixing a broken application in the base image and recover user data all using Mirage.
I am intending to record a number of demos around Mirage and Horizon Workspace and will place a copy of these online when I have done so.
Below you will see a short video we put together showing the demo environment that we used.
Virtualised Reality 