Stratusphere Designer mitigates risk, lowers cost, and improves user experience by delivering image, host, and storage design models based on observed assessment data – VMworld 2011
Liquidware Labs, the leader in desktop transformation solutions, today unveiled Stratusphere Designer for virtual desktops, an automated image, host, and storage designer for organizations migrating to Windows 7 using VDI. The solution will be demonstrated at VMworld 2011, August 29 through September 1.
Best practices for an assessment dictate that every organization migrating to Windows 7 using VDI should perform an assessment of their users with a solution such as Liquidware Lab’s Stratusphere FIT. The assessment should be performed for a period of at least two weeks to fully assess usage patterns, application inventory, storage consumption, and network quality. When the assessment is completed, Stratusphere Designer can quickly accelerate organizations into the on-boarding phase to avoid design guesswork and improve VDI user-experience as well as lower initial purchase costs and ongoing maintenance costs by providing a customized image host and storage design based on actual observed usage patterns.
“Stratusphere Designer is the logical next step that any organization needs to take after they have assessed their desktop infrastructure, users and applications with Stratusphere FIT,” said Dnyanesh Khare, Director of Product Management for Stratusphere, Liquidware Labs. “Stratusphere Designer delivers image, host, and storage designs for consultants and project leaders who are implementing a virtual desktop strategy. Storage costs and performance limitations have been the number-one roadblock to VDI adoption. Our image design is especially groundbreaking because it leverages real-world assessment data to design the best ‘many- to-one’ shared-image strategy, which reduces the storage footprint and ongoing management costs.”
Stratusphere Designer leverages the AppFIT™ feature of Stratusphere FIT to identify application compatibility with VMware ThinApp or Microsoft App-V. Designer looks at the used and installed applications and sets an estimated complexity level using the customer’s real-world infrastructure and application-usage data. Application considerations include file system drivers and application size as well as the use of shell extensions, services, and COM/DCOM dependencies.
Stratusphere Designer delivers an easy-to-understand bill of materials report that includes the image design strategy, the number of virtual host chassis and configurations needed (CPU, memory, network, storage host bus adapters), and the number of physical disks required to achieve the design and to host the virtual environment.
Availability
Stratusphere Designer is being demonstrated at booth #748 at VMworld August 29-September 1 and is planned for availability in Q4 2011.
About Liquidware Labs
Liquidware Labs™ is the leader in desktop transformation solutions for next-generation physical and virtual desktops, including VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop, and Microsoft Windows 7. The company’s Stratusphere™ and ProfileUnity™ solutions have been described by analysts as the industry’s first ‘On-Ramp to VDI,’ providing a complete methodology and software that enables organizations to decouple users and applications from the operating system and to cost-effectively plan, migrate, manage and validate the user experience for next-generation desktop infrastructure. Liquidware Labs products are VMware and Citrix certified, and are available through a global network of certified partners.