Oracle Magazine - July/August 2012

browsers, so you create multiple VMs to test against Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, or others, and on all the different platforms that you expect your customers to be using as well. By using virtualization in that way, you really can simulate almost every environment in which you expect your application to be used. Oracle Magazine: What role does Oracle desktop virtualization play when employees bring their own tablet devices to work? Hall: One of the big problems that system administrators are having is that not just any old end user, but the C-level executive is coming to work and saying, “Hey, I’m the chief financial officer, and I expect to be able to access my enterprise applications from this device.” How on earth can you do that? Typically the applications haven’t been designed for that device, so how can you deliver your standard enterprise applications to such a device? Well, it’s very easy to do with Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. You simply assign your CFO a virtual desktop that runs in the data center, and then install the Oracle Virtual Desktop Client for iPad. You start that up, and that is able to find your virtual desktop server, authenticate, and log in, and the CFO can access the desktop on his iPad. And we’ve gone further than that, because we realize that the gestures you use when you’re using a tablet device are very often different from the ones you use when you are using a keyboard and mouse. So we’ve mapped a certain number of those gestures to make it more natural to be able to interact with this traditional desktop environment on your tablet. Plus, you can hop between devices and locations and still get access to the same virtual desktop. So let’s say you’re sitting in the office and using your virtual desktop, and all of a sudden you get a telephone call that says you have to come home for dinner now. So you dash home, and when you’re at home you pick up your iPad, connect back into your virtual desktop server, and pick up the session from exactly where you left it. Oracle Magazine: How does Oracle address desktop virtualization security issues? Hall: The good news is that none of the data you’re interacting with from your Oracle Virtual Desktop Client on your PC, Mac, iPad, or Sun Ray Client exists on the client

“One of the things developers really want to
do is to be able to work from anywhere. . . .
And [that] means that [they] want a
complete development environment.”

—Andy Hall, Product Management Director, Oracle

device—you’re really just seeing a view onto that data. So if someone steals the device, they really haven’t stolen anything. Your desktop is still running in the data center, where it’s being looked after; where it’s tightly secured; and where you can keep audit trails of who accessed it, from where, when, and for how long.

Oracle Magazine: What’s new in Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3. 4, and what makes it important?

Hall: Traditionally, putting together a virtual desktop infrastructure solution from any vendor is a little bit hairy. You need quite a lot of capital expenditure: you have to get some shared storage devices, such as a NAS [network-attached storage] appliance; you need some servers on which you’re going to run your virtual desktops; you need some software that’s going to virtualize the desktop; and you need some software that’s going to allow you to get remote access from it securely over a protocol that has been designed specifically for accessing remote desktops.

One of the things that we’re doing with
Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3. 4 is to
address some of those challenges by offering
more and simpler deployment options. For
example, we’re offering a greater range of
storage options, so you don’t necessarily
need to go out and buy a big NAS device. You
can use either local storage or shared storage
such as NFS [Network File System] or SMB
[Server Message Block] to set up the virtual
desktop infrastructure. The other area that
we’ve improved on greatly is the delivery of
a richer user experience, because if you’re
using your virtual desktop, you really want
it to be as good as the experience you have
when you use a traditional PC. For example, if
you go to You Tube, you’ll see rich media types
inside of your browser, and you expect them
to be displayed from your virtual desktop
in a way that is comparable to a traditional
desktop deployment. To achieve that, we’ve
put in acceleration techniques at various
places in the stack. So, for instance, when
Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3. 4 sees
video being displayed in a virtual desktop, it
uses a different codec to transmit it down to
the client. And as you jump from device to
device, we’ve made the hotdesking, or session
mobility, a lot smoother and smarter. Oracle
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3. 4 also passes
the location of the endpoint up the wire to the
virtual desktop, and that’s very important in
deployments such as healthcare.
Oracle Magazine: What makes Oracle’s
desktop virtualization solutions unique?
Hall: First, Oracle is the only virtual desktop
vendor that can provide the hardware for
your virtualization layer, the storage service,
the server virtualization software, the
desktop virtualization software, the remote
access, and the endpoint device. So we
deliver the whole stack—hardware and soft-
ware, engineered to work together. Second,
when you’re using Oracle Applications,
Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is the
only virtual desktop environment certified
for use with those enterprise applications. 