Up to now we have seen a lot of debate about the enterprise readiness of RES Workspace Manager especially in regard to AppSense Environment Manager. In a couple of rare cases I agreed with the statements made but most of time I did not.

Without going into the details and start the discussion all over again I would like to focus on the changes in RES Workspace Manager 2012 and why I think Workspace Manager is now truly enterprise ready for all use cases.

One of the new features that comes with RES Workspace Manager is the addition of a new component called “Relay Server”.

Relay Server

The Relay Server is a new component that sits between a Workspace Manager (WM) agent and the WM databases. For those of you familiar with RES Automation Manager, think of it as a Dispatcher.

When you use the Relay Server the agent no longer talks directly to the database and the database only has 1 connection per relay server instead of 1 connection per agent.
The number of database connections has a direct relation to the maximum number of agents in your environment. The maximum number of connections is just over 32.000 and with 2 connections per agent this limits the maximum amount of agents in your environment to 16.000.
This means RES Workspace Manager can now handle a virtually unlimited amount of agents (users).

Of course this scenario also covers remote locations to minimize data traffic between sites.

Ease of management

How convenient the relay server might be there are a lot of customers where you just don’t need the Relay Server because of a small scale or a one site scenario. The great thing about the relay server is is that it’s not mandatory to use it! You don’t need it? Don’t do it and your architecture will look the same as it always did!

The greatest fun I had while testing the relay server is that it is so incredibly easy to use. If you know how the agent configuration works in previous (and this) version you also know how to configure a relay server!

Another great new feature is called “Quick Edit” which makes it possible to do standard actions to more then one object at a time. For example you can now select multiple applications at once to change thins like “Workspace Container” membership. This is a major improvement for daily system administration tasks!

The addition of Reporting Services makes it possible to create extensive reports about what your users are doing, when they do it and how they do it. This is great for automatic reporting especially knowing that RES Workspace Manager is now Microsoft SAM certified!

So in the end my conclusion is that there is no need to think RES Workspace Manager 2012 is anything but Enterprise Ready for even the largest of your customers.

If you like to go into more detail please take a look at another article about the Relay Server by Max Ranzau on Res Guru! http://resguru.com/technote-library/rg046-all-about-the-wm-relay-server-2/ . I would like to thank Max for some of the detailed numbers I used in this article.