Virtualization.com

News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

desktop virtualization

AppSense Revenues Growing Rapidly

by 1 Comment

AppSense, provider of user environment management solutions for large-scale environments, reported a 50 % increase in U.S. revenue for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2008.  Its global business realized a 30 percent increase in worldwide revenue.

AppSense is aggressively focusing on the U.S. market, having doubled its investment in the U.S. over the last two quarters with increased investment planned again for the current fiscal year.  New U.S. customers this fiscal year include JP Morgan Chase, Lowes, United Airlines, Wachovia, Wal-Mart, ESPN, Applied Materials, and CB Richard Ellis, among others.  AppSense counts 15 of the top 20 banks worldwide as customers, with nine of them actively using AppSense software to personalize their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments.

AppSense’s user environment management solution enables users to have the same look and feel, shortcuts and other settings on a virtual desktop that they had on their PC, while ensuring they adhere to company policies, such as accessing pre-determined printers, applications, networks, drivers and folders.  This allows companies to gain the benefits of desktop standardization and automation, including savings in hardware, storage and management oversight, with no impact on a user’s experience.

AppSense’s solution lets IT use a combination of desktop and application delivery methods—such as VDI, presentation virtualization, streamed applications and local and provisioned desktops—and easily and transparently migrate users from a physical to a virtual desktop.

3PAR Launches Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI

by Leave a Comment

3PAR announced today 3PAR Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI, an integrated virtual desktop provisioning and management solution for VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

3PAR Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI is designed to let its customers automatically provision hundreds of high-performance virtual desktops that consume only a fraction of the bandwidth and storage capacity required with traditional storage.

3PAR says its Utility Storage enhances the benefits of implementing VDI on a traditional SAN by providing additional performance, simplified provisioning, and rapid recovery while reducing required capacity—benefits that are ideal for these next-generation virtualized environments.

3PAR Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI builds on 3PAR Virtual Copy to create a resilient utility computing infrastructure that maximizes the benefit of centralized desktop management. 3PAR Thin Copy Desktop offers high performance desktop booting, automated provisioning, and rapid desktop recovery while consuming 90% less capacity for desktop images.

3PAR also announced today enhancements to 3PAR Virtual Copy to support up to 128 read/writable snapshots per base volume and the ability to promote a child Virtual Copy snapshot to any of its read/writable parent snapshots. Up to 500 read-only snapshots per base volume also remain supported with these enhancements.

3PAR Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI comes with 3PAR Virtual Copy at no extra charge.

3PAR

VDIworks Brings Desktop Virtualization Management to Hyper-V

by Leave a Comment

VDIworks, the young company recently spun out of ClearCube, announced it has tied its solution with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007, which provides management of physical and virtual deployments throughout the data center, desktops and devices.

VDIworks released a new plug-in, VDIvision for System Center, allowing its customers to use MSCOM to manage a variety of VDIworks-driven features. The management plug-in includes a highly configurable and scalable connection broker, leveraging the power of desktop virtualization. VDIworks utilized APIs from Microsoft to ensure seamless functionality among both products.

On the heels of Microsoft’s release of Hyper-V, VDIworks is the first virtual desktop management vendor to integrate with Hyper-V and the System Center management offerings. The plugin is integrated with Active Directory so IT managers can control users’ access rights and permissions. It runs a SQL Server database at the back end in which enterprise IT can store all the components of the VDI environment so it can run reports against them and manage the environment.

VDIvision for System Center is platform-agnostic, so it can also run with the VMware and Xen hypervisors.

[Source: InternetNews]

VDIworks

Exclusive Video: VMware In A Nutshell, By Product Marketing Manager John Gilmartin

by Leave a Comment

So what’s VMware all about now on a technology level, now that their stock went tumbling and their CEO has been replaced? John Gilmartin, Group Manager, Product Marketing at VMware answered our questions on virtualization in general and their strategy and product portfolio in particular.

After defining virtualization and virtual machines, John dives deeper into what drives prospective virtualization customers (infrastructure consolidation, high availability, business continuity, disaster recovery?). He also shares more on their recently announced VMsafe initiative, which allows trusted partners to ‘peak’ into a Virtual Machine and identify threats from the outside of the operating systems and the applications they try to protect.

John underlines that VMware is offering features far beyond the basic data center consolidation needs; such as life cycle management, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), automated provisioning, fail over, disaster recovery and optimize the management tasks for a virtual infrastructure.

All this is part of VMware’s from-desktop-to-datacenter portfolio and makes VMware feel confident and well positioned to compete with Hyper-V from Microsoft.

Tresys Ships VM Fortress, Aims To Meet High End Desktop Virtualization Security Needs

by Leave a Comment

Tresys Technology, a provider of technology and services for customers with high security requirements, today announced (PDF) the availability of Tresys VM Fortress, a patent-pending secure desktop virtualization technology for organizations seeking strong security and operational integrity.

VM Fortress (not to be confused with vFortress, a company recently acquired by Propalms), aims to give organizations with high-end security needs the ability to utilize desktop virtualization without compromising protection by strengthening the guest operations system and the virtualization software itself to withstand the most threatening of compromises.

According to the press release, VM Fortress benefits and market differentiators include:

  • Strong Endpoint Security: Providing strong, independent control over system resources by leveraging the flexible mandatory access control (MAC) features provided by Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) to limit damage caused by exploitable vulnerabilities in virtual machines
  • Decreased Operational Costs: Removing the barrier of entry to desktop consolidation where security assurance is a high priority; leveraging stronger MAC security reduces the damage and costs to desktop environments should they become attacked
  • Increased Data Confidentiality & Integrity: Providing separation for the user and the application on a per VM basis, ensuring that data is not leaked across VMs and that applications cannot interfere with each other while sharing the same hardware resources
  • Increased Operational Integrity: Limiting the effects of attacks and errors, so that vulnerabilities in one VM cannot be exploited to gain access to other VMs or to the host operating system
  • Ease of Management/Deployment: Systems can be deployed over the network from a central installation server and VMs can be remotely downloaded on demand by the user

Citrix Integrates Access Gateway 1.8 With XenDesktop

by Leave a Comment

Citrix has integrated its Access Gateway appliance, version 1.8 with its recently released XenDesktop virtual desktop solution. Citrix’ security solution will allow companies to deliver virtual desktops to users based on identity, location and security status.

Citrix said its SmartAccess technology, when applied to its VDI solution, will allow customers to deploy virtual desktops more quickly and more securely to users worldwide. Additionally, the gateway’s wizards have been extended to support XenDesktop. The configuration wizards now enable IS managers to automate common XenDesktop configuration tasks.

The 8.1 release of Citrix Access Gateway costs about $3500 and includes end user licenses for XenDesktop use.

[Source: ZDnet Blogs]