Foreword

For the better part of two decades modern IT administrators benefited from a fairly predictable progression of more powerful, yet cheaper technology at their disposal to provision to users to keep them happy and productive in their daily jobs.

While powerful and responsible for where we are today - one facet lingers today as a penalty we all must contend with. This is the issue of "scale". Scale should be thought of as the RATIO of users, devices, applications per admin - not simply the sheer size of any deployment. For therein lies the problem we all continue to try to solve: How to take this remnant of the power of Moore's Law and the proliferation of cheap, powerful Windows Workspaces and reign it back in.

Virtualization ushers in a completely new way to think about both the process and architecture of deploying Windows Workspaces to end users. No longer do we need to think of a workspace as a static stack of hardware, OS, software, and user environment. Furthermore - we don't necessarily need to continue to have a one to one relationship with every one of them.

Instead we use the power of virtualization, centralization, and abstraction to allow us to assemble workspaces on demand - combing new OS's, applications, security policies, and many more as needed, where needed, and how they are needed.

Solutions like VMware Horizon, Citrix XenDesktop, or Amazon Workspaces should be considered for any organization looking to get scale to begin to work for them, instead of against them. And much like the foundational platforms of the past such as Compaq, HP, Dell, and others - an ecosystem has emerged to cater to a host of operational, security, and application lifecycle management requirements.

In this book you will begin or perfect your journey to a new way to think about the provisioning, deployment, and management of next-generation Windows Workspaces.

J. Tyler Rohrer

Co-Founder Liquidware Labs