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• • WorkSpaces Images
    • The first step to creating WorkSpaces for your users is to create a WorkSpaces Image.
    • This should have the latest Windows Updates and any management software and applications you want to maintain within the base image.
    • We recommend creating a "Golden Image" as your base and using existing management tools to manage WorkSpaces like any other Desktop / Laptop on campus.
    • WorkSpaces, and the images and applications that make them up, should adhere to CU Policy 5.10.
      
      
  • WorkSpaces Bundles
    • A bundle decides the OS Version, CPU, RAM, SSD and GPU resources available to a set of WorkSpaces.
    • One Image is assigned to a Bundle, but the Image can be updated / swapped out with any other Image you create, at any time.
    • Once a WorkSpace is created, its bundle cannot change, but you can update the Image within the Bundle and then Rebuild the WorkSpace to apply the updated Image.
    • Rebuilding a WorkSpace with a new Image has a few caveats and is analogous to "re-imaging" a physical computer. Technically, the User Profile will persist, but file integrity is only guaranteed if a Rebuild is performed within a certain maintenance window. For this reason, we recommend using traditional management tools to administer WorkSpaces as if they were a physical computer.
      
      
  • WorkSpace
    • A WorkSpace is a single VM assigned to a single user. 
    • WorkSpaces have a "Registration Code" that is unique to each directory. Users will need this Registration Code to configure their client to connect to their assigned WorkSpace.
    • When WorkSpaces are set up to use CornellAD, as outlined in this wiki, the user logs in with their Cornell NetID & Password.
    • Only one WorkSpace can be assigned per user, per directory.
    • You cannot change the user assigned to a WorkSpace, it is forever assigned to that user.
    • WorkSpaces can be set to Always-On or Auto-Stop. We recommend using Auto-Stop in the majority of cases. The cost savings are phenomenal and it only adds ~30-60 seconds to resume a WorkSpace when a user connects.
    • WorkSpaces can optionally have the OS Drive and / or User Profile encrypted at rest (full disk encryption). We recommend enabling full disk encryption, as it is a requirement for CU Policy 5.10.

WorkSpaces Application Manager (WAM)

WAM allows you to manage and update your applications separately from the WorkSpaces Image. You can assign applications to user WorkSpaces based on AD group membership. This makes license management as simple as assigning a user to a group. You can choose to make application installs required or optional in the WAM console. For example, you might want to require that Identity Finder be installed and kept up to date, but give the user the option to install Adobe Photoshop at their discretion. You can also keep track of and limit the total number of installs for any one Application.

To use WAM, you first create a WAM Package using the tools outlined in the AWS WAM documentation. Then you create a WAM Application with that Package assigned; the Application is configured with a version and AD group. You can update an Application with a new Package version any time you want. The model is very much analogous to the Image / Bundle concept for the WorkSpaces themselves.

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