Even in 2016 there are still applications that have not been designed for working in a Service Based Computing (SBC) or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment. Getting them to work in such an environment can be a headache, especially when the customer wants it to work.
As a consultant it’s then always good to have some solutions or tools that can make the what seems impossible more possible, even when not supported by the vendor.
In this blog I will show how such a problem was solved was using RES VDX and will briefly describe the technique used for that.
The situation
At a customer that was using a VDI Solution based on VMware View. Applications are installed in the VDI image or delivered as a virtual Novell Application Virtualization package. A couple of people have locally installed applications due to VDI-performance issues and do not have a vdi desktop. Some people use a thin laptop to connect to the VDI desktop pools remotely from home using a software token for multifactor authentication. At the Office 99% of the people use Windows 7 (Enterprise!) thin clients to connect to their VDI desktop.
The challenge
Management did buy a medical video conferencing application for easy and quick contacts between certain patients and doctors to have contact through a webcam. Besides talking and seeing the patient, the doctor should be able to see and open documents and other information regarding their patients. This documents should be shared during this video call and also more than one doctor should be able to attend this session.
As this software didn’t work within VDI, because of protocol issues, a solution should be found that could hopefully solve this problem. At first sight it looked quite a challenge
The solution
Taking all options in consideration, looking at the tools they had already been using, RES VDX seemed to be an option. They were already using RES Workspace Manager and enabling and using this product could be an option.
In picture 1 can be seen how this RES VDX solution works.
Picture 1: RES VDX-solution
As can be seen in figure 1, an application called ‘local app’ is installed on the device connecting to the SBC or VDI back-end. In this case a thin client connecting to a vdi environment. This local app is installed with the RES VDX Plugin on the thin client. In the VDI desktop the so called RES VDX Engine is installed and causes the locally installed app to be presented in the VDI machine as i fit were installed in the vdi desktop.
RES VDX integrates seamlessly with RES Workspace Manager, so the application shortcut could be published pretty easy by that. Also the video conferencing application installation on a group of devices could be done easily, so the customer was having their solution up and running within a couple of weeks!
Conclusion
Of course, in the first place, the IT department should have involved in choosing the right video conferencing application. They would have seen the application wasn’t working in the first place. Maybe there was an alternative available that would and could preferably have been used.
In this case, the customer was lucky that because the customer was already running RES Workspace Manager, RES VDX was up and running after a relatively simple installation and configuration in a Proof of Concept and pretty soon it was clear that it could help them to setup the requested video conferencing calls from a tool that was locally installed and appeared as if it was installed I the SBC or VDI session.
RES VDX to the rescue!
