In July Burton Group (now part of Gartner) released a report on the  enterprise-readiness of Quest vWorkspace, just as they had previously done for  Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View. The findings of these studies were presented  at VMworld last week. I’m not going to spend time discussing how the other  products fared or analyzing the criteria selected for this report. For this post  I’ll just try and put the case forward for why vWorkspace qualifies as an  enterprise-ready product and give some color on our plans to further enhance our  remarkable feature set.

As I understand it there were seven areas where  vWorkspace was judged to have fallen short of the required standards for  enterprise readiness. There were three product feature areas and four “support”  areas. Let’s look at the product features first, although I have to warn that I  can’t be specific on the release dates for forthcoming features:

1. Logging of Administrative Activity. Despite providing what  we believe is the most comprehensive and granular management console of all the  desktop virtualization management vendors, it is true that our current console  does not provide logging of administrative actions. The good news is that this  feature will be appearing in vWorkspace 7.2 beta 2. Beta 1 is publicly available  now http://blogs.inside.quest.com/provision/2010/08/23/public-beta-release-vworkspace-72-beta-1/ and beta 2 is progressing well and coming soon, complete with reporting of  actions of management console operations.
2. Integration with Management Systems. First, we have  advanced integration with System Center Virtual Machine Manager today for  management of virtual desktops on Hyper-V. Our use of differencing disks for  rapid VM creation and hardware profiles for VM preparation is unique. Second, we  have a PowerShell interface entering beta shortly which will provide substantial  integration capabilities with all kinds of third party management systems and  platforms. We have developed this in conjunction with the PowerShell community  http://powerscripting.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/episode-119-adam-driscoll-on-powergui-visual-studio-extensions/.  Third, 7.2 will also feature a full logging and reporting database with a  published schema to allow enterprises, service providers and other third parties  to develop easy integration with vWorkspace’s inventory and configuration data.  Finally, we have also begun development on more advanced monitoring capabilities  which will include integration with System Center Operations Manager.
3. Integrates with enterprise application delivery controllers  (ADCs). Juniper support has been included with vWorkspace for some  time, although the documentation is only available through Tech Support today,  which we will rectify. We are also introducing F5 Firepass support in 7.2 which  will be fully documented.

Next, let’s look at the other support-related reasons cited by Gartner:

1. Community support. We have a Quest community support site  with a desktop virtualization section being filled with content right now. This  exciting new platform for getting spport, betas and feedback will be made public  very soon.
2. “Support limited to 2 years”. We have had a 3 year support  option for vWorkspace in all our price lists for a long time. This also ties to  the next point…
3. Published support life cycle dates at product launch. The  reality is that, like every other software vendor, we don’t know the release  dates of the next release at launch, but Quest support policy defines for how  long we will continue to support previous versions when a new version is  released. The product lifecycle table is here: https://support.quest.com/search/PLC.aspx?id=PL206
4. Certification program for third-party application vendors.  Keen observers will have seen “vWorkspace Ready” stickers on the show floor at  VMworld. More news in due course.

That wraps it up for the required features for enterprise readiness. There  are a couple more areas that were indicated as weaknesses in vWorkspace I would  like to cover:

• Lack of support for common smart phones, tablets, and  netbooks. Let’s handle these one at a time: netbooks run either Windows  or Linux, and we have excellent support for both! Tablets – again, keen  observers at VMworld might have spotted a product manager from Quest with an  early version of our vWorkspace Connector for a well-known tablet. Smart phones:  I’ll refer you to this tweet from Chris Wolf at Gartner: “iPhone examples for  virt dktp are misleading. Anyone try using Word on an iPhone using CTX Receiver  or Wyse PocketCloud? I did. Never again.” http://twitter.com/cswolf/status/19931035506
• Lack of support for disconnected desktops. Although this is  not a requirement for “enterprise readiness”, it is a desired feature and both  Citrix and VMware have well-known announcements in this area. At VMworld we  announced (http://vmblog.com/archive/2010/08/30/quest-and-virtual-computer-announce-integrated-server-and-client-hosted-desktop-virtualization-at-vmworld.aspx)  that we are partnering with a number of vendors to deliver support for both  online and offline users. The first we announced was Virtual Computer, who have  a remarkable type 1 hypervisor and management platform. There are others coming  too focused on type 2 hypervisors that we will be working and integrating with.  Citrix is solely focused on type 1, which requires specific hardware and a  complete bare metal reinstall. VMware abandoned their type 1 efforts and have  gone type 2, which is seen by some to have performance and security limitations,  and requires that the user’s primary OS is not broken in order to get to their  VM. We can see both sides of these arguments so we are going to support and  integrate with both client-side hypervisor types.
• vWorkspace is not suitable for enterprise-scale  deployments? As part of the Gartner analysis we provided guidelines on  scalability of vWorkspace farms of 25,000 virtual desktops or more. We have  numerous customers running many thousands of desktops from a single console  using our automatically load-balancing connection brokers, including this case  study for 6,000: http://www.quest.com/Quest_Site_Assets/SuccessStories/CSV-vWorkspase_TexasSchoolDistrict-US-AG.pdf and this press release of a site pushing to over 20,000: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100831005290/en

I hope this was informative. Quest vWorkspace is a proven enterprise-class  solution with many best-of-breed features. You can learn more and try an eval at  www.quest.com/vworkspace.