Less than a year ago I was an enthusiastic participant in the Dell vWorkspace beta program. I’m saddened that it seems Dell won’t continue with its development. It is a great product and is well-liked by many in the community. It seems with the upcoming acquisition of VMware; Dell has decided to bow to VMware’s VDI stack rather than compete internally.
If you are a current customer, you will continue to receive support and be able to expand your environment as needed but that may beg the question, why?
Why would anybody commit to maintaining their vWorkspace environment in the long term when development is going to cease? Of course, some organizations will be stuck between a rock and a hard place. They invested heavily in the product and can’t just undo what they have already done. But it stands to reason that long-term planning for current customers will likely turn towards other products on the market.
Alternatives to vWorkspace
VMware has been growing an impressive stack with key acquisitions including CloudVolumes and Immidio. The announcement of the Blast protocol is also very exciting. They are painting a very pretty picture.
Citrix has also been busy with AppDNA integration and the arrival of AppDisks in 7.8 adding to their already impressive XenDesktop and XenApp offering. The upcoming release of Unidesk with even greater XenApp integration is exciting, so too is the XenApp integration with Turbo.net, who provide access to over a thousand pre-containerized applications which can also receive continuous updates, effectively eliminating most packaging. Citrix also has a wealth of experience and maturity in this space that cannot be denied.
Over at my website, I blogged about some other products which really excite me including Unidesk and WorkSpot. I am currently testing Unidesk on top of Hyper-V and RDS. Unidesk, in my opinion, offers the most simple and complete tooling for managing virtual desktops. It’s the absolute best way to get to that goal of a single golden image.
With WorkSpot I can manage my environment from anywhere and access my desktops and applications from any device, you can even use Unidesk to manage the environment, which I love.
WorkSpot’s VDI 2.0 is unique; basically, they allow you to outsource many of the moving parts required in a VDI. You remove the need for standing up web servers, load balancing services, and broker services and instead run those from the cloud. Together with a Hyperconverged solution, you can scale the environment rapidly.
Also, as suggested, they provide a product to access your desktops and applications from anywhere with any device. You simply download their app, connect and go. It really is very simple.
