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.