Scale Computing announced a partnership with Leostream a little while ago. With the global pandemic drastically changing the way a large amount of organisations are working, it seemed like a good time to talk to Alan Conboy about how this all worked from a Scale Computing and Leostream perspective.

Easy As 1, 2

Getting started with Leostream is surprisingly simple. To start with, you’ll need to deploy a Gateway and a Broker VM. These are CentOS machines (if you’re a Scale Computing customer you can get likely some minimally configured, pre-packaged qcow appliances from Alan). You’ll need to punch a hole through your firewall for SSL traffic, and run a couple of simple commands on the VMs, but that’s it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The way it works is that Leostream has a small agent that you can deploy across the PCs in your fleet. When users hit the gateway they can be directed to their own (physical) desktop inside the organisation. They can then access their desktops remotely (using RDP, SSH, or VNC) over any browser that supports SSL and HTML5. So, rather than having to go out and grab a bunch of laptops, setup a VPN (or scale it out), and have a desktop image ready to go (along with the prerequisite VDI resources hosted somewhere), you can have your remote workforce working remotely from day 1. It comes with a Windows, Java, and Linux agent, so if you have users running macOS or Linux they can still come to the party.

I know I’ve done a bad job of describing the solution, so I recommend you check out this blog post instead.

Thoughts

I’m not at all passionate about VDI and End User Computing in the same way some people I know are. I always thought it was a neat solution that was frequently poorly executed and oftentimes cost a lot of money. But it’s a weird time for the world and, sadly, it might be something like a global pandemic that finally means that VDI gets its due as a useful solution for remote workers. I’d also like to point out that this is just a part of what Leostream can do. If you’re after something outside of the Scale Computing alliance – they can probably help you out.

I’ve spoken to Alan and the Scale Computing team about Leostream a few times now, and I really do like the idea of being able to bring users back into the network, rather than extending the network out to your users. You don’t have to go crazy acquiring a bunch of laptops or mobile devices for traditionally desk-bound users and re-imaging said laptops for those users. You don’t need to spend a tonne of cash on extra VPN connectivity or compute to support a bunch of new “desktop” VMs. Instead, in a fairly short amount of time, you can get users working the way they always have, with a minimum of fuss. This is exactly the kind of approach that I’ve come to expect from Scale Computing – keep it simple, easy to deploy, cost-conscious, and functional.

As I said before – VDI solutions don’t really excite me. But I do appreciate the flexibility they can offer in terms of the ability to access corporate workloads from non-traditional locales. This solution takes it a step further, and does a great job of delivering what could be a complicated solution in a simple and functional fashion. This is the kind of thing we need more of at the moment.