HPE Edgeline BIM/Engineering Workstation – Overview

The new offerings have new enhanced GPU capability with the HPE Proliant m750 and providing a dedicated GPU from NVIDIA more specific the NVIDIA P1000 or NVIDIA T4. The solution requires no hypervisors and lowers complexity while enabling the mobility of users and enhancing user experience. This solution is designed to meet the requirements of power users such as designers, architects and visualizers that require high performance with reduced physical footprint, and targeted towards 1-499 users.

Challenges with CAD workstations today

• Engineers are chained to desk
• Not flexible with getting compute as they need
• No scalable solution
• Data requires to be copy down from network locations and can take long time
• Data requires to be modified quickly and takes long time with synchronising−Engineers can’t work on any device 

Transforming high end workspace to current working style

Benefits of replacing physically BIM workstations with HPE remote workstations.

• Move physically workstation to a central location and unchain engineers for their desk
• Work from Home−Centralizing compute
• Benefit of a scalable GPU solution
• Benefit from central datacenter performance accessing the CAD/BIM files
• IT Security and IP Protection 
• Providing mobility to work from any device such as tablet
• Providing engineers/designers a great dedicated and guaranteed user experience

Expanding the bare metal VDI family

HPE now have 3 hardware solutions and its 3 different form factors.

• HPE Moonshot 1500
• HPE Edgeline EL4000
• HPE Edgeline EL8000 / EL8000t

HPE now supports Citrix CVAD on all Moonshot/Edgeline solutions with bare metal but also running virtualised with Citrix Hypervisor & Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktop.

Citrix supporting Bare Metal

Citrix has been supporting bare metal setup for a while actually let’s dig into the facts.

• Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops (XenDesktop) has been supporting Bare metal since 2009 when HDX 3D Pro got available, which is 11 years. The technology was made in 2006 but first GA with deep compression codec in 2009.

HPE Edgeline and Citrix Cloud Architecture

Let’s dig in to the architecture.

HPE Edgeline and Citrix Cloud Virtual Apps & Desktops show in the below picture you can use Citrix cloud, but it’s also fully supported with onprem Citrix CVAD infrastructure if you have a requirement for that. You can use a thin client from HP T740 which is the best hardware thin client on the market that also can decode multiple 4K monitors without any user experience gets impacted. The great thing about below archictecture is you can have 4 physical workstation’s in 1U centralised in your datacenter or edge location without compromising user experience with virtualising. The power of bare metal is you get exactly what the hardware can deliver. Now that said, if you wanna virtualise below hardware, you can do that with no issues and it is fully supported as well.

HPE Edgeline BIM/Engineering Workstation – Overview

The new offerings have new enhanced GPU capability with the HPE Proliant m750 and providing a dedicated GPU from NVIDIA more specific the NVIDIA P1000 or NVIDIA T4. The solution requires no hypervisors and lowers complexity while enabling the mobility of users and enhancing user experience. This solution is designed to meet the requirements of power users such as designers, architects and visualizers that require high performance with reduced physical footprint, and targeted towards 1-499 users.

Challenges with CAD workstations today

• Engineers are chained to desk
• Not flexible with getting compute as they need
• No scalable solution
• Data requires to be copy down from network locations and can take long time
• Data requires to be modified quickly and takes long time with synchronising−Engineers can’t work on any device 

Transforming high end workspace to current working style

Benefits of replacing physically BIM workstations with HPE remote workstations.

• Move physically workstation to a central location and unchain engineers for their desk
• Work from Home−Centralizing compute
• Benefit of a scalable GPU solution
• Benefit from central datacenter performance accessing the CAD/BIM files
• IT Security and IP Protection 
• Providing mobility to work from any device such as tablet
• Providing engineers/designers a great dedicated and guaranteed user experience

Expanding the bare metal VDI family

HPE now have 3 hardware solutions and its 3 different form factors.

• HPE Moonshot 1500
• HPE Edgeline EL4000
• HPE Edgeline EL8000 / EL8000t

HPE now supports VMware Horizon on all Moonshot/Edgeline solutions with bare metal but also running virtualised with VMware ESX & VMware Horizon.

VMware Horizon supporting Bare Metal

VMware has been supporting bare metal setup for a while actually let’s dig into the facts.

• VMware Horizon RDSH has been supporting Bare metal since Horizon 6, which is 6.5 years.
• VMware PCoIP has been supporting +10years with host card for bare metal
• VMware Blast for VDI has been supporting Bare metal for the last 2 years and have been supporting Windows 1803 or 1809.

The big news is that as of today, officially, HPE is supporting VMware Horizon on bare metal in HPE Moonshot and Edgeline. It used to be only Citrix that was positioned the last 7 years and this changes today, which I am really excited about as the platform becomes more open as it should and can benefit customers in the world.

HPE Edgeline and VMware Horizon 8 Architecture

Let’s dig in to the architecture.

HPE Edgeline and VMware Horizon show in the below picture you can use VMware Horizon cloud, but it’s also fully supported with onprem VMware Horizon infrastructure if you have a requirement for that. You can use a thin client from HP T740 which is the best hardware thin client on the market that also can decode multiple 4K monitors without any user experience gets impacted. The great thing about below archictecture is you can have 4 physical workstation’s in 1U centralised in your datacenter or edge location without compromising user experience with virtualising. The power of bare metal is you get exactly what the hardware can deliver. Now that said, if you wanna virtualise below hardware, you can do that with no issues and it is fully supported as well.

Citrix have released a new version of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop 7 2009

FIDO2 via Windows Hello is now supported which is awesome 🙂 And Citrix is also supporting iOS14 and BigSur when its gets GA soon. Lots of new features and security enhancements.

This blogpost also features information about Citrix new health check tool and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop service what is new September 2020, such as support for NVv4 instance in Azure. I have also included Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop Standard for Azure service, what is new.

Release is now available for download, September, 2020.

Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktop 7 2009 is a CR release. Read more about CR here

Citrix Virtual Apps (former name: XenApp) Citrix Virtual Desktop (former name: XenDesktop)

Citrix raises the bar of for user experience and new product release of following technologies:

• Director 2009
• Virtual Delivery Agents 2009 for ServerOS and ClientOS
• Virtual Delivery Agent 2009 for Linux
• Citrix Licensing 11.16.6
• Citrix Federated Authentication Service 2009
• Provisioning 2009
• Profile Management 2009
• Workspace Environment Management 2009
• Session Recording 2009
• Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop Service
• Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop Standard for Azure
• Citrix Cloud Health Check
• Workspace App 2009 for Windows
• Workspace App 2009 for Windows (Store)
• Workspace App 2009 for Linux
• Workspace App 2009 for Chrome
• Workspace App 2009 for Android
• Workspace App 2009 for MacOS
• Workspace App 2009 for HTML5
• Workspace App 2009 for ChromeOS

Update: (1th October 2020)
My friend @mbp_netscaler told me he tried with newly released Office 16.43 it fixes the issue with Citrix. So it was not Citrix fault but the bug was with Microsoft, interesting 🙂 but happy to share its working With Citrix Files latest release.

I have today found out a major bug in Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) with OS Windows 10 Multisession version 2004. After helping a client with expanding some FSlogix storage, I saw there was some important patches for OS (CU) and some security patches, its always recommended to apply these patches, as you will gain performance and stability and improve security.

But after applying these CU, I ran into a very strange problem that when you login to the Multisession host from any WVD client, the Windows screen flicker and keep updating in the GUI and you couldn’t do anything not click anything inside the desktop. After some research on the web, I saw other people facing the same issue with as I saw. The interesting part was that Pieter Wigleven from Microsoft, confirm this bug and that the Microsoft Search team will solve this part in future builds of Windows.

UPDATE 22TH SEPTEMBER 2020
FROM PIETER WIGLEVEN, MICROSOFT

This specific issue only impacts Windows 10 Enterprise/multi-session version 2004 and the fix is currently scheduled for release in the third week of October 2020. 

In that third week of October - if you manually click the “Check for Updates” button you will get it. 

If you won't check manually, you’ll receive this bugfix in November's Patch Tuesday (second week of the month).