“With this release of Stratusphere UX, we now have key architectural elements in place to extend and enhance our capabilities to provide greater workspace visibility,” said David Bieneman, CEO and co-founder, Liquidware. “Our focus on the enterprise workspace provides a solution that not only scales, but offers higher-availability to support the needs of our customers’ growing environments.”
“As organizations extend their workspaces beyond physical PCs—to include on-premises and cloud-based virtual workspaces—the need to view a user persistently across all platforms has also increased,” noted Kevin Dralle, Solutions Architect at Presidio. “Whether Citrix, VMware or full-on local Windows, the visibility provided by Stratusphere UX is unparalleled. And with the increased enterprise functionality, an already great solution just got better.”
Attributes to Better Support the Enterprise
Stratusphere UX has always been at home in large environments. This major release will introduce a new Highly Scalable Architecture, which will significantly increase the amount of user, machine and application data Stratusphere can capture for visibility. Major architectural changes include the addition of a distributed Collector Appliance, for the aggregation and collection of Stratusphere Connector ID Key (an extremely lightweight in-guest agent) data and network data.
The new architecture, coupled with other platform changes, will offer far greater scalability to support both more information density as well as larger user environments. Additionally, the new Collector Appliance will provide high-availability for in-guest data collection—related, Connector ID Keys now offer a feature to failover to another Collector in the event of an appliance or infrastructure failure.
In-Guest Visibility Extended
In addition to supporting all major versions of Microsoft Windows and Linux distributions, this release of Stratusphere UX will add support for Apple OS X (El Capitan) and macOS (Sierra). Many existing customers have noted the importance of Apple workspace visibility. This release brings that machine and associated user and application views to Stratusphere UX.
Release 6.0 of Stratusphere UX also will include formal support for Windows Server 2016 and a native Connector ID Key for IGEL OS™-based clients, which offers organizations greater visibility into the end-user desktop computing experience for IGEL-based client devices; allowing them to better monitor and manage user experience and performance.
All About the Applications
To help advance application strategy, version 6.0 contains a couple of new core application-based reports and metrics. New to Stratusphere UX 6.0 is an application layering candidates report. This report provides analysis and detail to assist in the identification of applications that may be good candidates to deliver via Liquidware’s application layering technology, FlexApp. For each identified application, Stratusphere UX will provide a complexity score and rating that is based on the use of elements such as whether the application employs shell extensions or uses COM/DCOM for its operations—critical factors to consider when contemplating application delivery.
The Stratusphere UX 6.0 release will also include an applications strategy assessment report, which offers a starting point for administrators looking to devise a comprehensive application strategy. This report provides basic inventory information as well as application counts, where an application is run and the resources consumed. It provides details on applications services and offers an application complexity rating and recommendation whether it should be distributed in the base image, or using an application layering approach like Liquidware FlexApp.
To better support the application lifecycle, Stratusphere UX 6.0 will also include new application-specific GPU metrics. Based on a partnership with NVIDIA and its software development kit, Stratusphere UX adds to its NVIDIA GRID visibility with new application-specific encode, decode, frame buffer and graphics utilization metrics. GPU can play a significant role in the delivery of virtual desktop workspaces, and the combination of Liquidware Stratusphere UX and NVIDIA Tesla GPU cards offer a solution designed to support the monitoring, diagnostics as well as to visibility to support application optimization and health.
