Dell Unveils Virtual Workstation Appliance

Top Trends Driving the Data Center in 2015

Looking to make desktop virtualization a feasible alternative for high-end graphics applications, Dell today unveiled the Dell Precision Appliance for Wyse.

Dan O’Farrell, senior director of product marketing for client cloud computing at Dell, says that as graphics applications begin to play a bigger role outside of departments like engineering, organizations are looking for a more efficient way to share these types of files.

The Dell Precision Appliance for Wyse combines a Dell Precision Rack R7910 workstation, NVIDIA Quadro and GRID GPU technology, and VMware virtualization software to support up to three users per appliance in dedicated GPU mode or four to eight users per appliance in shared GPU mode. Users can connect via a variety of endpoints, including Dell Wyse dual or quad display thin and zero clients, desktops, laptops or other workstations.   

While desktop virtualization has a reputation for being expensive from a total cost perspective, O’Farrell says VMware has made advances in its latest offerings that now make it both practical and affordable to provide shared access to graphics applications using an appliance. Not only is it practical in terms of being able to readily identify how many users per appliance there are, O’Farrell says organizations can simply scale out by adding more appliances as needed.

Obviously, there are a lot of ways to collaborate around graphics applications. The challenge is finding a way to achieve that goal without actually compromising the graphics application experience.