More on Management and Orchestration – Part 1 – Desktop Virtualization Automation

Over the past year or so, from time to time, I’ve blogged about what we in Cisco Services have been doing with our Management and Orchestration solutions – for example Cisco Intelligent Automation for cloud – which I discussed in the Automation domain in my Cisco Domain Ten series, and also here, when we introduced a new release.   Cisco’s Automation and Orchestration technology has applications beyond cloud Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS), so let me tell you over a few blogs what else our Cisco Services team can help you achieve with this flexible automation technology, where customer needs for simplicity, automation and end user productivity are in the driving seat.

I’ll start with Desktop Virtualization Automation – specifically in the provisioning process.  And while I’m at this, let me highlight our upcoming Bright Talk Webinar, scheduled for May 29th at 8am PST (5pm CET), where you can see a demonstration of our Desktop Virtualization Automation solution in action- you can register for this seminar here.

So why automation for desktop virtualization?  I can hear you say “Aha – but we already have  solutions for this from VMware and Citrix – why do we need Cisco Intelligent Automation?”

There are a number of key reasons why we’d recommend a Cisco Services solution for automation of Desktop Virtualization provisioning.  We’ve identified these needs as our solutions architects in Cisco Services help customers, via our Plan Build and Manage services, to roll out large scale VDI deployments globally.  We’ve helped many customers, including financial sector, petrochemical and public sector organizations, who are planning to roll out DV to 5000++ (and beyond!) end users.

Here are some of the advantages of the Cisco Desktop Virtualization Automation solution:

(1) Being a services solution, we are able to customize the solution to your exact needs

(2) Typical desktop tools are targeted at technical users.  The Cisco Desktop Virtualization Automation solution, while it most definitely can be used by technical users, it is particularly attractive to non technical IT users.  So you can have sales personnel, procurement and HR staff requesting virtual desktops from a service catalog!  And of course – with VDI administrators being a scarce resource, technical users can also exploit the solution as a productivity tool, to help them get more done in less time, as the solution automates many process that, with traditional VDI solutions are typically performed manually.

(3) The Cisco Desktop Virtualization Automation solution abstracts away from the underlying complexity, dealing with the complexities such as the setup of groups and catalogs of virtual machines, and creatio and registration of master images for example.

(4) The solution delivers a VDI specific service catalog, which in itself helps drive IT simplicity among your end users

These of course are just some of the reasons – to learn more, please do attend out upcoming seminar – you can register for this seminar here – where you will hear some of our consulting experts tell you much more about the Cisco Desktop Virtualization Automation services that deliver such an automation solution.