LATEST NEWS
PBG Offers a Pre-Upgrade Site Survey for Ericom, VMware, and NetApp Upgrades
Conducting a Site Survey before you upgrade your Ericom, VMware, and NetApp systems can save time and money, and reduce post-implementation problems. Let PBG take the worries out of complex upgrades by evaluating your IT environment prior to any production changes. Bellm ... Read More
PBG to Offer Human Resources Continuity Planning Services
Business continuity planning involves more than protecting information technology assets. It also involves protecting people, or human, resources. By investing in a Human Resources Continuity Plan, companies can help ensure the continuity of critical business functions despi ... Read More
Ericom Blaze Delivers Terminal Services up to 25 Times Faster
Ericom Blaze enables users of Microsoft Terminal Services to deliver graphics-rich applications and data, including virtual desktops, up to 25 times faster. Bellmawr, NJ (Vocus/PRWEB ) April 6, 2010 -- A recent breakthrough in RDP acceleration and compression technology ... Read More
VDI: New Trend in Achieving Office Independence
Remote workers require anytime-anywhere access to business data and applications without jeopardizing data security or functionality. To satisfy this need, PBG has partnered with Ericom to provide a desktop virtualization (VDI) solution that has unique benefits, including th ... Read More
The Three Cs of Technology
The Three Cs of Technology By Scott Brousseau, CTO PBG, Inc. 3/9/2010 The three Cs in today’s business world are consolidation, centralization, and conservation. The focus is to create a harmoniously designed network that efficiently and economically meets all of a bus ... Read More
VDI Rolling Review: Ericom's WebConnect Goes Above And Beyond
Posted by Randy George on January 7, 2010
Tags: Ericom, Rolling Review, VDI, VDI Rolling Review, desktop virtualization
Channel: Data Center, Networking & Mgmt, Virtualization
Our Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) rolling review continues with Ericom. Founded in 1993, Ericom established itself early on as an diverse application delivery platform. Today, Ericom's PowerTerm WebConnect makes a strong case for becoming a part of your VDI infrastructure.
As is the case with the other VDI players in our review, we rate products on their ability to serve out virtual desktops. We scrutinize how well each solution provisions and manages large pools of virtual desktops on the fly. We also evaluate support for multiple hypervisors at the virtualization layer. Some of the players in our rolling review, like Sun, only support a couple of hypervisors. Some support more, but they require substantial administrative effort. Others, such as Quest, offer an impressive mix of options for storing your virtual desktops and do a good job at serving them out. And then there' s Ericom.
WebConnect supports all the major virtualization platforms out there. Ericom offers extensive XenServer support. Other VDI players can serve up virtual desktops with a XenServer backend, but at the time of our review Ericom was the only vendor, other than Citrix, to offer power and state control and the ability to mass-provision virtual desktops. Ericom also supports some community versions of Xen, like Red Hat and Novell Xen, and easily takes the prize for the largest number of supported virtualization engines. WebConnect installed relatively easily in the lab, and can be deployed on a single physical server or on a virtual machine for smaller environments. The PowerTerm Connection Broker administration tool, which can snap in to the Microsoft Management Console, is fast and stable compared to the Web management platforms that some other vendors provide.
Creating pools of desktops with WebConnect is a snap. Just define the host storing the virtual desktops and create the pool that will manage those desktops. Both operations are wizard driven and take less than a minute. You can tweak performance and user security properties, such as who has access to the virtual desktops in the pool, with a right-click of the mouse. It's just as easy to set up a dynamic or static pool. The Ericom broker also does a great job at creating desktop pools sourced from multiple back-end hypervisors. For example, if your organization is slowly migrating away from ESX and toward Hyper-V or Xen, you can create a pool of desktops that spans both ESX and Hyper-V/Xen.
One minor annoyance was the need to run a separate management application, the WebConnect Administration Tool, to expose our virtual desktops via the Ericom Web Portal. However, this tool is where all the magic happens. Making a group of virtual desktops available to your users is just a small part of what you can actually provide with WebConnect. Based on AD login, you can customize Web portals for each user to offer a combination of virtual desktops, terminal services applications and/or legacy applications that can be streamed via App-V (SoftGrid).
Additionally, you can expose individual documents, spreadsheets, web links and terminal emulators for access to, for example, an AS/400 mainframe application, all on one portal. Ericom is the only VDI broker we've tested that lives up to the claim of being a replacement for Citrix as a Web portal for serving out virtual desktops and applications simultaneously.
Access to applications and desktops via the Web portal was seamless in the lab. Thanks to its integration with Active Directory, authentication to virtual desktops and other applications exposed on the portal are automatically passed through via WebConnect's single sign-on feature. On the whole, we struggled to find negatives with this product. List pricing for WebConnect is based on concurrent user count, and ranges from $79 - $229 per depending on options purchased.
