Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions offer several benefits to organizations, including improved security, centralized desktop management, and reduced IT workload. Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) makes VDI quick, easy, and affordable. It enables organizations to deliver fully functioning virtual Windows desktops and applications to employees. Parallels RAS allows users to be productive anywhere by providing a Windows desktop–like experience on any device. Parallels RAS simplifies the VDI deployment.
Hypervisor Flexibility
Parallels RAS supports Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer, and hyperconverged infrastructure such as Nutanix Acropolis, HPE, and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). Parallels RAS can create and manage VMs from different hypervisors simultaneously, offering administrators an extended flexibility when deploying VDI solutions.
Simplified VDI Management
Parallels RAS automatically generates and deploys VDI desktops on demand, using customized templates. This allows administrators to create and deploy guest VMs on the fly, saving a great deal of time. Create a virtual desktop once and replicate it as many times as needed.
Using linked clones, the IT team can simply copy the files already available on the virtual disk at the time of the VM snapshot instead of launching a whole new full VM. This allows multiple virtual machines to use the same software installation, also saving disk space.
"VDI Client – With major hardware manufacturing companies introducing new and innovative VDI client hardware, IT administrators now have multiple options when deploying desktop virtualization. Igel Technology has released UD6 that expands the range of applications for thin client computing considerably and is aimed at the most demanding power users."
-Sean Bianco
Test Guest VM Template Wizard
Parallels RAS includes a Test Guest VM Template wizard, which automates VM testing and VM deployment to ensure that custom-built templates work smoothly, reducing the administrator's manual tasks.
The wizard test templates can create a working instance of a guest VM to ensure they have been created and configured correctly. This gives the administrator peace of mind knowing that the templates are fully deployable.
Storage Space Management
The VM template function is used to deploy the VDI hosts for the clients, allowing the IT administrator to set a preconfigured alive timer or set a persistent session that needs to be removed manually.
After the predefined time expires, the VM image is deleted from the Parallels RAS server, removing the storage space that was reserved for it. That way IT administrators can have automatic management of the storage space used by the VDI hosts.
VM Pool Management
Pools offer administrators more flexibility when managing an extensive number of guest VMs, especially when they are implemented in large company infrastructures. IT administrators can set multiple virtual desktop templates on their farm and share them between user groups. Each group can have a virtual desktop template with specific requirements, such as document-processing tools for finance or image-processing tools for creative, thus simplifying account management on the IT side.
