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AnthonyFlag for United States of America

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Connecting to VMware over WAN versus LAN

Hi Everyone,

I have more of a general question rather than something specific.  My organization is considering moving production from our office to a managed co-lo.  With this we were asked to monitor our internal bandwidth so we can pick the appropriate private line between the co-lo and our HQ.  We currently use VMWare view to connect to desktops and have 4 ESX hosts.  We are looking to connect a max of 50 desktops.  

What I don't understand is, when I connect from home and input the external IP to access the view server, technically I'm just going over the public internet at whatever given bandwidth I have.  So why wouldn't we just get extremely fast internet in both locations and just connect to the view servers in that require?  Why require a private line if PCOIP is supposed to be very secure?  

I believe there might be something I'm missing, but any information would be really helpful.

-Anthony
Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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Added security for your organization, if required.

Also a private WAN Link, will guarantee the bandwidth and service you have purchased, unlike using the internet, could be anything. Your private LINK will also have an SLA attached to service with the communications company.

What would happen, if you had communications link failure, one day, all 50 employees would not be able to work, this should be factored into your Service Level Agreement with your communications company to provide resilience, fail over, resilience circuits.
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ASKER

Ok, the security is the first thing I assumed.  

If we had redundancy for the internet connection- i.e. Business Fios, Optimum LightPath, and an XO direct internet access line.  Wouldn't that cover the redundancy portion?  I mean with all of the business providers I would have to review the SLA; however the price difference is huge.  

For example, we are based in Northern New Jersey, 12 miles outside of NYC.  We are considering moving to a co-lo located in Pennsylvania, about 60 miles away.  If we went to a private 50Mbp line it would cost $2500/month.  If I were to drop Fios business in both locations and had speeds of 300Mbps upload and 65 Mbps download, the cost would only be $280/month in each location.

So I'm trying to see if I applied the logic for 3 different carriers why it wouldn't work or for that matter just 2 different carriers on two different circuits.
It would depend on the loss to the business, if WAN link was down, and what Business impact if any would it cause, could you carry on working locally, on local PCs, as an example.
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ASKER

Understandable, and that's something we've also thought about.  Since we never made the plunge to Windows 7, Windows XP's support runs out in April (I believe).  For us to continue we'd have to purchase new machines to run Windows 7, which goes against the argument for having virtualized the environment.  (A large capital outlay now, for significantly less outlay later).  

But we are also considering is the fact that we don't have power redundancy in our current building other than battery backups for crucial servers.  Since most of the work is conducted over the internet for us, unless we put in a generator that tied into the circuit it would be counter productive.

I'm just trying to understand though why it wouldn't work other than SLA's and things of that nature.  Is there a physical reason it wouldn't?
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Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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Ok great.  Thanks for the information.  I'm going to leave the question open a little more in case anyone else has any other input.