VMware overhauls Workspace One for better performance

VMware has revamped its Workspace One mobile and virtual desktop platform by boosting performance, making it more service-oriented and easy to manage.

Workspace One is VMware’s endpoint-management package for delivering, managing and securing application access to any device across the a cloud or distributed on-premises enterprise. The highly-integrated suite includes device management, single sign-on, remote access control, endpoint security, analytics, automation and virtualization.

The changing way workers are using and accessing applications from multiple devices prompted the over-arching need to change Workspace One and how its services are delivered.

“Over the past decade we’ve seen tremendous growth in mobile and desktop endpoints managed and secured by Workspace ONE. While the heterogeneity of endpoints expanded horizontally, we also saw the number of endpoints scale vertically for every one of our customers. This clearly called for a much more powerful architecture that would perform at scale and thrive in this ever-growing endpoint complexity,” wrote Naveen Pitchandi director of product, VMware Workspace ONE unified endpoint management (UEM) in a blog about the news. 

The upgrades inhclude containerized Workspace ONE SaaS microservices architecture that VMware says is designed to drive a 10-fold improvement in performance and scale. Device management and screen loads now occur in a fraction of seconds even for environments with millions of devices, Pitchandi stated.

And with containerization, changes to a particular component impact that component only. That lowers the risks involved in changes and helps test each isolated use case more thoroughly. It is also easier to identify and resolve issues, VMware stated.

Containerizing Workspace One means new features can be created without large dependencies on other features. Containerization also means shorter build times, faster feature development, and faster bug fixing, VMware stated.

“Workspace ONE is now architected to be aware of the desired state of the device, and when it detects the device drifts from that desired state, it promptly performs the necessary task to return the device to the desired state,” Pitchandi stated.

This compute workload can be offloaded to the client in the case of desktops to provide low-latency, offline remediations where possible. It can be handled by the server for lightweight endpoints such as mobile devices, Pitchandi stated.

This move unlocks significant opportunities for better security, device compliance, and even more streamlined device management, Pitchandi stated.

Other new Workspace One features include:

• A new version of the system’s Freestyle Orchestrator. a low-code workflow-orchestration platform for Workspace One admins to automate system tasks and policy-setting.
• The Workspace One Marketplace, which provides a variety of out-of-the-box content for the Workspace One admin including templates, scripts, and other resources to address endpoint management, user experience, and workspace-security use cases. Marketplace integrations allow organizations to connect third-party cloud applications and offers pre-packaged offerings for use cases such as onboarding and offboarding, license optimization and security quarantine workflows.

Analysts said the new Workspace One features are welcome and a significant change to a well-established platform.

“The changes will make Workspace One easier and faster to deploy as well as maintain and use,” said Phil Hochmuth, program vice president with the Endpoint Management and Enterprise Mobility practice at IDC. “It also opens up Workspace One to broader system integration and automation scenarios with cloud platforms such as security, IT service management, analytics and productivity suites and tools.”

VMware says the new architecture and performance improvements will being rolling out in the second half of 2023. 

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