New workstation virtualization center lets Dell customers test first

The Round Rock, TX, facility provides a physical location and remote access for customers, channel partners and independent software vendors

Dell has opened its first Workstation Virtualization Center of Excellence to help customers and partners test and transition workstation applications to a virtualized environment.

Located at the company’s headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, the center provides a physical location and remote access capabilities for customers, channel partners and independent software vendors (ISVs) allowing them to evaluate virtual workstation solutions before making purchasing decisions.

Customers are increasingly moving from under the desk, into the data center, says Andy Rhodes, executive director, Dell Precision. “They want a place to come without buying a lot of equipment to do proof of concept. [With the center of excellence] customers can do performance testing and work with industry experts and partners like Intel and NVIDIA.”

The center also allows ISVs to compatibility test and certify existing applications for virtual workstation environments and better use new technology such as NVIDIA GRID, GPUs, which are designed for cloud deployments.

“We have seen a keen interest from our customers in virtualized environments for increased security, streamlined manageability and end‐user flexibility,” said Bertrand Sicot, CEO SolidWorks, Dassault Systèmes. “We’ve committed to certify and support configurations for virtualized 3D graphics to provide the same level of confidence and support that current SolidWorks workstations users have come to depend on.”

The Workstation Virtualization Center of Excellence supports Dell’s recently unveiled Dell Wyse Datacenter for Virtual Workstations end‐to‐end reference architecture. This new solution allows secure sharing of applications and common data, rapid deployment and efficient scaling, and centralized management of infrastructure. It gives engineers and designers secure and central access to data and graphics‐rich applications from any location on almost all devices, providing flexibility and enabling collaboration.

“The notion of a 1:1 relationship between a user and a piece of hardware is going away, as an increasing number of IT managers see desktop virtualization as a viable means of providing users with a secure, manageable and resource efficient way to access their desktops and applications,” says Rhodes.

Dell Wyse Datacenter for Virtual Workstations offers tested and certified configurations for workstation‐class applications to optimize CPU power, memory and address a company’s unique workload considerations.

It can be deployed using Dell Precision R7610 rack workstations or Dell PowerEdge R720 rack servers with NVIDIA GRID K1 or K2 graphic cards on the VMware Horizon View and Citrix XenDesktop platforms. Users can connect via desktops, laptops and tablets, Dell Precision tower and mobile workstations and Dell Wyse thin and zero clients.

A centrally hosted and managed graphics environment allows IT managers to deploy high end workloads while ensuring data integrity and security.

“We are seeing a change in the way users of data and graphics-intensive applications are able to securely access their data outside of the office,” says Rhodes. “The idea of the fixed location‐based workstation has changed as users need to be mobile and collaborate efficiently with others both within and outside of their organization,” says Rhodes.