Resource provisioning, monitoring, and optimization – these topics are all very relevant to any hosted desktop initiative. Especially if you’re rolling out a large-scale deployment with several moving parts.
When designing your hosted or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), sooner or later you’ll need to decide how to assign resources to end users and manage their connections. You could hard-assign desktops to users and create links or shortcuts that the user clicks to access their desktop. But, that solution will never scale. Plus, if you are trying to share applications and desktops, hard-assigning desktops to a user doesn’t help you maximize resource usage. So what do you do? You turn to a connection broker to solve the complex issues associated with how users connect to hosted desktops and how these desktop connections are managed.
A connection broker is a small, but powerful piece of software that acts as traffic control in busy desktop environments. It’s the brains of any hosted desktop deployment – physical and/or virtual – and is the key component for assigning resources to end users and controlling the end-user experience.
More specifically, IT administrators rely on a connection broker to provide the following functions:
- Validate the user name and provide a connection for the user
- Provide the ability for the user to connect to a specific virtual machine (VM), virtual client, PC blade or terminal services server
- Provide the ability for the user to access multiple VM pools. (If the user is permitted to access a variety of pools, the broker prompts the user to select a pool at login time.)
- Provision new desktops when pools reach their lower bound to ensure desktop availability for users
- Support the appropriate display protocol required for adequate end-user performance
- Streamline security by integrating with authentication systems, SSL, VPNs, proximity cards, etc.
- Handle reassignment of a virtual machine when a user disconnects
In the grand scheme of things, the connection broker is a small part of the overall equation, but it’s also a very important piece. Waiting until you’ve designed the rest of your data center to consider the connection broker can be detrimental to the overall usability of your system. In our recent webinar, we walk through the ins and outs of this technology and introduce you to the Leostream Connection Broker version 8.2. We pull back the curtain to demonstrate how you can use the most popular features to simplify the management of your desktop environment. Dubbed, “the broker to end all brokers” and “the broker to rule them all,” this is not a webinar to be missed!