News

Dell Drives Move to Virtual Workstations

New resources to help organizations make data-intensive applications virtual.

• By Christa Ayer
• 03/10/2014

For organizations using data-intensive applications such engineering, oil and gas, media, and graphics applications, running on end-to-end virtual workstations probably hasn't seemed feasible. Dell hopes to change that perception through two new initiatives: the Workstation Virtualization Center of Excellence (CoE), as well as end-to-end reference architectures for Citrix and VMware.

The CoE, located in the Dell Solutions Center in Round Rock, Texas, will provide a physical location and remote access for customers, channel partners, and ISVs to evaluate the benefits of running data-intensive applications on end-to-end virtual workstation solutions. Dell will provide advice, free to customers and partners, on how to architect their solutions to best take advantage of virtual environments. ISVs will be able to compatibility test and certify existing applications for virtual workstation environments.

The end-to-end reference architectures, from the Dell Wyse Datacenter for Virtual Workstations, will help customers simplify and speed the deployment of  graphic- and data-intensive applications in virtual environments, while keeping them fast, reliable, and secure. Dell is immediately releasing tested and certified configurations for workstation-class applications for Siemens PLM Software. In the coming months, Dell plans to release configurations for and Autodesk, PTC Inc., and Dassault Systémes.

Organizations can deploy the architectures on 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.