Part one of this blog examined today’s healthcare IT environment and why VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) is one of the most recommended strategies to successfully manage it.
As promised, this blog is going to review the VMware “AlwaysOn Point of Care” solution. In full disclosure, VMware is one of the Rolta AdvizeX strategic partners. We do work with others, but there is also a reason we do so much with VMware.
VMware has really stepped up its investment in the Horizon portfolio over the last few years. They also created a specific healthcare reference architecture called the “AlwaysOn Point of Care”. There are three products from VMware we harness to help tame the healthcare application portfolio: App Volumes, ThinApp, and Workspace Portal.
App Volumes is a relatively new acquisition for VMware. As advertised this product provides a rapidly scalable platform for just in time application delivery. App Volumes secret sauce it its ability to virtualize the windows registry. It then uses this technology to create multiple “App Stacks” which are containers that can be attached to the virtual desktop at any time. The applications then become instantly available to the end user.
To see App Volumes in action take a look at this video showing fifty applications being deployed to a virtual desktop in just a few moments. App Stacks can be mapped using Active Directory and we recommend creating a security group with the users and/or groups for each App Stack. The tricky part is figuring out the mapping of applications to App Stacks. A virtual desktop can have a maximum of fifteen App Stacks attached to it at any time. What I have recommended is to create App Stacks by department and then use ThinApp for the outliers.
ThinApp is the first application tool that VMware developed as part of its View VDI platform. It is able to virtualize individual applications by creating a container for each application. Once the application has been successfully “ThinApped” the resulting containerized application can be deployed anywhere regardless if the underlying OS has support for the application. One of the classic demos for ThinApp is showing the same desktop running multiple versions of IE at the same time. This is a great use case for applications that require an older version of IE, you can ThinApp the version of IE that is needed and set it to only go to the URL of the desired application. This allows continued use of the older application while limiting security exposures of users accessing websites with the older browser. The one thing ThinApp lacks is a way to distribute the containerized applications to the end-users. The two primary ways to distribute the applications are to either use App Volumes or Workspace Portal.
Workspace Portal creates a central location for end-users to get access to their applications. It brings together applications from ThinApp, RDSH, XenApp, and many other sources to create a single interface where users can access all their applications. The applications can be either accessed through the web page (shown below) or the applications can be added as icons to the virtual desktop. Additionally Workspace Portal provides a SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) based single sign-on authority enabling SaaS (Software as a Service) applications to be accessed from the portal as well.
The benefits of this approach to managing a healthcare applications portfolio are pretty apparent. As a quick summary, here are the top capabilities we like about this VMware solution:
- App Volumes provides the ability to rapidly deploy and manage a large number of applications to virtual desktops from a central location.
- ThinApp delivers a big benefit for environments where applications have dependencies on older technology. Containing the application makes it easy to transport to current and future versions of Windows.
- Workspace Portal allows us to easily distribute applications to the virtual desktop and bring together other virtualized application technologies such as XenApp, RDSH, and SaaS.
Overall, I’m a fan of the VMware solution for digital healthcare. In a future blog, we’ll look at one organization’s experience and how they benefited.
Have your own experience with VMware? Let us know! We’d love to hear from you on what worked in your organization. ▪