Year: 2015

Dell Wyse Appliance – Quick Start Tool

chrismessier Blog, NVIDIA GRID, Wyse Appliances ,

DellWysePrecisionAppliance

One of the great features of the Dell Wyse Appliance for Citrix, vWorkspace or Precision is the ability to quickly setup these appliances by using our Quick Start Tool. The Quick Start Tool is a wizard that will walk you through the appliance configuration in a series of steps and at the end will configure the appliance with your configuration. This helps to get these appliances up and running quickly especially for POC’s and small environments. Here is a great video walk through of the Quick Start Tool for the Precision Appliance

A review of the appliance was also done 1/2016 at Storage Review which you can check out here.

I’ve included some of the steps you would normally see for one of the appliances below.. The screen shots below are what the Quick Start Tool steps would look like when configuring the Precision Appliance using vGPU & NVIDIA K2 video cards.

  1. Launch Quick Start Tool

QST_start

 

2. Overview of Quick Start Tool and information to get started including configuring the host.

QST_precision1

 

3. This screen shows the 2 NVIDIA K2 cards (2 GPU’s per card for total of 4 GPU’s as shown) in this specific appliances configuration.

QST_precision_k2

 

4. Once your host is configured and in this case, NVIDIA cards selected, the Quick Start Tool will go through and configure the appliance.

QST_precision3

 

5. Once the appliance is configured the last steps will be to install the operating system and applications.

Hopefully this gives you a high level view of what the Quick Start Tool does and provides a bit of an overview of the process.

You can see a video of this same configuration here.

New NVIDIA and VMware Community (NVC)!

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GRID_COMMUNITY

NVIDIA & VMware recently launched an online community for customers looking to deliver a VDI solution based on the combination of NVIDIA & VMware to deliver high end graphics. The community allows customers and partners to exchange best practices and troubleshooting ideas to get up and running.

It looks like a great resource for folks looking to deploy these solutions as there tend to be a lot of nuances with trying to deploy multiple solutions together so a community forum is a great source!

Dell World 2015 – Desktop Virtualization

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dellworld

This year was my 1st Dell World and I sure picked an exciting year to make it my 1st! There were lots of highlights to this years Dell World but one of my favorites was seeing Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, on stage during the keynote with Michael Dell. It’s not very often you get to see these industry leaders in person so that was really cool.

The keynote highlighted many things we are accustomed to hearing about innovation, customer testimonials, and being “future ready”. It was very interesting to see all the stuff Dell is also doing in the IoT space which is an exciting area and fun to see and hear first hand real world applications.

Of course, Dell World 2015 wasn’t complete without talking about EMC and all the excitement around that! If you want to check out a great video on Michael Dell talking about this head here – the guys at @theCUBE are awesome!

In the keynote there was several mentions of VDI whether it was touching on the Wyse acquisition, the stuff we are doing with hyper-converged appliances such as Dell XC (Nutanix) as well as mentioning VMware’s Airwatch solution.

The Cloud Client Computing desktop virtualization area was all powered by Wyse thin and zero client devices for all the demos.

We had lots of interest around our NVIDIA GRID enabled Dell Wyse Precision Appliance as well as our 2 other VDI appliances Dell Appliance for Wyse – Citrix & vWorkspace. We also highlighted our 2 key offerings for hyper-converged VDI appliances, Dell XC powered by Nutanix and the VMware EVO:RAIL appliance.

The 2 key things I keep hearing from customers and partners is they are excited about all advanced graphics capabilities we are now able to deliver in VDI as well as making VDI simpler to deploy. VDI is inherently complex, lots of moving parts and knobs and dials to turn. If we can make VDI simpler to deploy and deliver on the promise of making the experience similar or better than your existing PC then that’s a win!

NVIDIA GRID vGPU – VMware Horizon View Resources

chrismessier Blog, NVIDIA GRID, VMware Horizon

NVIDIA_GRID

NVIDIA GRID & VMware have published some great resources on learning more about the recently announced NVIDIA GRID vGPU support with VMware Horizon View 6.1 on VMware vSphere 6.

I’m always on the look out for great resources to share with customer and partners. 2 great resources are noted below. Good luck!

Good luck with your testing and deployments!

So you want to be a ‘Desktop as a Service’ (DaaS) Provider?

chrismessier Blog, VMware Horizon ,

Well, you can certainly ‘dial up a desktop’ from any number of Desktop as a Service (DaaS) or Workspace as a Service (WaaS) providers but some partners and customers want to build their own.

A few good resource’s if your going down this road are noted below.

Dell Wyse Datacenter for VMware Horizon DaaS Reference Architecture

Learn more here!

and

Horizon DaaS (Desktop as a Service) Platform for Service Providers (Formerly Desktone)

Learn more here!

Finally, a must read for anyone heading down this road is the Desktop as Service book by VDI ninjas, Brian Madden & Gabe Knuth! You can get your hands on it here! Enjoy!

Welcome to VDI Toolbox!

chrismessier Blog

Hello! Thanks for dropping by to learn more!

The goal of this site is quite simple, to help customers and partners learn & deploy many of  the solutions in the Dell desktop virtualization portfolio and a variety of associated virtualization technologies.

We cover things like thin clients, zero clients, various VDI datacenter appliances, high end graphics like NVIDIA, troubleshooting resources for Citrix and VMware and many other topics.  Just like many others who blog, this site also serves as a personal repository of links, tools and resources that I commonly reference in my daily work as well and hope others find helpful!

I’d love to hear your feedback on any ideas or topics that you would like me to add the site!

Thanks!

-Chris

contact: Twitter or LinkedIn

site feedback? chris@vditoolbox.com