Since the announcement of the Avalon Project at Synergy San Francisco in May, I have had many conversations with customers trying to understand exactly what it means to operate or use Windows as a cloud service. The words "cloud" or "cloud service" can have many different connotations and many business customers the cloud can be a scary place they know they are headed for, but not sure what their organizations iT, infrastructure or workflow will look like when they get there.
instead of trying to explain the concepts of cloud operations and IT-as-a-service, I would like to discuss two different but related conversations I have had with many IT organizations that have requested exactly what Project Avalon offers ... but never used the word cloud
operating at cloudscale.
It has been well established that the performance of small desktop virtualization deployments is easy. An administrator can create original images, thin provision to create a group of clones, and manage some workstations catalogs against some AD security groups. The administrator knows what resources he can see the servers and storage in a rack and knows he has the network between hosts and storage to give him or IOPS performance and can see the load on individual hosts for ensure performance and availability. With a background in virtual infrastructure tools and practical knowledge of XenDesktop or VDI-in-a-box, a single administrator can easily manage hundreds or even a few thousand workstations without leaving his console.
Get a few hundred to several thousand workstations gets harder ... An administrator can not see or touch all the necessary resources, and the division of labor becomes critical. Storage, networking, virtual infrastructure, support and NOC teams must all work together to optimize their part of the puzzle by adding reliability and efficiency. workload performance requirements very transient and IOPS critical with varying degrees of persistence and HA requirements can certainly be conquered, and were my many XenDesktop customers running tens of thousands of jobs, but each of these clients to work on their own management workflow based on manual processes and / or scripts that are prone to human error as any manual process.
So the common question we receive from our more experienced clients is how they can increase their environment while separating the roles of a virtual desktop manager with those of the storage or networking, or virtual infrastructure teams? How data center infrastructure team can provide good service to the Office team, and vice-versa so that they can optimize the delivery of virtual desktops? These customers will never use the word cloud, but that is exactly what they want.
The first phase of Avalon project, the release Excalibur is designed among other things to provide customizable, purpose and field based RBAC (Role based access controls them) designed to allow management across the cloud to FlexCast through application and desktop delivery. Then advanced configuration logging and intelligent configuration wizards help ensure secure deployments consistent at any scale.
See overview Tech Excalibur
The next phase of Avalon project, the Merlin release, is being built to take advantage of a layer of abstraction between computing, storage and networking infrastructure and desktop services set needed to make the simple virtualization to the "next level." by defining the transfer between infrastructure resources and higher level services, it can more easily manage and reliably complexity of cloud-scale availability and performance management through the instrumentation and automation.
IT centralization
another common maintenance with our enterprise customers is along the lines of the age old struggle with the consolidation and centralization of iT resources while meeting the needs of local or disparate business units. Whether an IT organization acquires new companies, expanding oversees, or just trying to reduce costs by centralizing resources, or improve their security posture through standardization, there is a constraint between "local" and "central" IT. Generally, it is the office of people who are caught in the middle. Local administrators are to meet the demands and requirements of their local leaders and co-workers while trying to enforce centralized policies reorganized their "bosses" in the company. (Sound familiar, anyone?)
The constraint does not cease to be the local teams. The central office team tries to understand how virtualize thousands of applications and determine the right mix of virtual and hosted applications based image applications installed to the business units on another continent. Central teams know the infrastructure, they do not, and probably can not expect to understand the workflow needs of users worldwide.
These customers require a way to provide central office services with the ability to standardize for cost and security policy, but delegate the creation and management of the individual image management, politics the group, and the virtualization of application nearest IT organizations to their "clients".
again, the project will enable Avalon centralized IT organizations to organize effectively to provide cost advantages and strengthening the security of mass centralization, while enabling decentralized IT resources to take advantage of a central service to customize and manage services for their users. The instrumentation and automation behind "cloud portals" are a necessity to enable companies to take advantage of "cloud", or massively centralized resources that they can not see or touch.
Instead of treating the central resource just like a large pool of infrastructure, the Avalon project goes one step further to build a service offerings, service catalog, or a subscriber options menu specific to Windows workstations and application services. This approach enables enterprise IT organizations to effectively leverage the power of the cloud with the workflow, instrumentation, tools and best practices needed to take advantage of economies of scale. Meanwhile, a new class of service designers will be empowered to create services focusing on user productivity and convenience for the business units, distributed locations and end-users with the tools they need to work and play everywhere. In short Central IT acting as a service provider.
Learn how Citrix is leveraging the experience gained in more than 00 service providers
Learn more about the self-service layer
T organizations want to be more relevant than ever in the cloud of the time. Shifting focus and leverage the Avalon project to enable new services that allow flexibility; convenience and efficiency will allow them to be just that.
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