One thing is clear from the coronavirus: work has long since ceased to be a place where employees work in a mobile, secure and flexible manner using the end devices of their choice.
What do we mean by a mobile and flexible workplace? The aim of a flexible workplace is to be able to meet the challenges of the job safely, efficiently and in full - detached from the current place of work (e.g. home office, meeting room, etc.). Especially due to COVID-19, more people are working in a home office - many for the first time. In some cases, this presents a new challenge not only for the workers themselves, but also for employers and their infrastructures.
The classic IT architecture approaches often fail to meet the required flexibility. The reason for this is grown client/server architectures, which provide the backend of the application on the server - but the frontend is classically operated on the client (i.e., the user's workstation). However, this requires massive bandwidth in order to transfer data smoothly between the backend and the frontend. The classic architecture quickly reaches its limits, especially for performance-hungry applications in CAD, healthcare or R&D environments.
The following solution scenarios fully cover the needs in this area while retaining the classic application architecture. However, they guarantee complete flexibility for the workplace.
Terminal services based on the Virtual Data Center (vDC)
Low-performance workstations with classic office applications can often be made available very easily via terminal servers. In user use, only the screen output is transmitted between the data center and the user - the data itself remains in the data center. Due to the problem-free scaling (also reduction again) of the Virtual Data Center Services (VDC), it is possible to react very quickly to challenges such as these and to ensure work from the home office quickly and easily.
VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) based on the Virtual Data Center (vDC)
In the case of performance-hungry applications or workstations, we recommend VMware VDI Services (VMware Horizon). Here, the entire workstation is packed into a VM - but this continues to be operated in the Virtual Data Center and, if necessary, supported by the graphics performance or computing power using GPUs (professional graphics or computing processors). In this way, specific use cases such as CAD, image processing, 3D data, development scenarios, etc. can also be continued without restriction in the home office. Here, too, any scaling or reduction of the workload can be implemented at any time for maximum flexibility.
