Amazon Workspaces: A dish best served later Amazon Workspaces, the etailer-cloud-service-provider's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure service based on a “Windows 7 desktop experience”, has been uncorked. Actually, it's Windows Server 2008 R2 with the desktop experience enabled – possibly for licensing as much as for technical reasons. Microsoft is awkward about licensing …
If a laptop is your solution to a hosted virtual desktop, then you probably haven't understood the problem.
This is about providing a full desktop anywhere on any device with the right client, backed up centrally, still available if your first floor office gets flooded and you need to relocate to higher ground. They're the first of the big players to do it, there are smaller regional companies providing this already. But if your use case fits, eventually something like this will fit for you too.
At the moment, most organisations will be looking at hosting their own alternative VDI solution, or investing in developing their applications to support application or session virtualisation technology instead. Session or App virtualisation brings the same benefits with less infrastructure required. There are bridging products that allow you to share out physical desktops as remote sessions, and for some that might get them over the line until a reliable hosted solution is available.
I can forgive some of the issues encountered since its not a trivial thing and since its a new roll out there are bound to be issues.
Having said that most places give you a discount for trialling their new systems Azure for example normally gives you a 50% discount.
50% off would be a reasonable price, unless they start billing by the hour of usage?
RDP is an order of magnitude more responsive across high latency connections such as between the UK and The Colonies than say X-Windows! Especially with high bandwidth content like video.
nb - RDP (ITU T.120) isn't pixel copying - it's compressed GDI instructions - See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc239611.aspx
The 1990s called, they want their Sunrays back. Or was it the X-terminals? God I loved those beasts. Slim little units from NCD that booted over RARP/BOOTP and had a screen the size of a small house.
Seriously, whilst the cost is steep ($35*12*3 > $1200 > laptop + Office) and the perf is a bit poor, if there's one thing we've learnt from AWS it's that opex is preferred over capex by a lot of organizations, and they are good price cutters. OK so that was two things. But people who snigger at AWS normally end up regretting it. As in the days of the OS Wars, a crappy solution from Seattle can destroy a technically superior solution simply by being ubiquitous, cheapish and good enough.
Dear Ann,
the only reason why opex is preferred over capex is that opex has no further subdivision at higher levels, whereas capex has. That is a gross oversight, because if done properly opex for work places would almost certainly be higher through AWS than capex+opex with physical touchable stuffs. Of course, you also have to count in the minutes / hours that people have to waste because AWS is down and effects 100s rather than just the one person with a PC problem... All that detail is lost at higher level... And this, I'm afraid, is also the reason why offshoring is such a success.. Costs are hiding in places where they should not....
Regards,
Guus
The VMware offering is already here for $35, works well, has better options, and - I'm assuming here - will likely have some sort of integration with on premises View infrastructure in future. A fair review would be size by side comparison now Amazon has released their version?
AWS workspace is for an enterprise where considering VDI, not a desktop replacements.
running in-house VDI is quite expensive due to complexity it needs to have rapid deployment of images, fast SAN (as each user will drain 100-200 IOPS during logons) and large RAM on hypervisor farm.
You may not argue why VDI? why not RDS/Citrix XA?, problem is always applications that fails to run under RDS/XA. or apps that perform poorly.
and if you believe its poor performance from where you are, of course it is not meant to be fast for every users from current deployment of US West or US East. For optimal condition, you need sub 100ms to the VMs and/or with WAN Optimisations.
I cant wait for it to be available on Sydney(ap-southeast-2), its going to be interesting.
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