Unidesk 1.0 extends VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop
Interview: Chief Solutions Architect Ron Oglesby explains Unidesk's layering technology and how it helps with desktop virtualization adoption
Follow @infoworldToday Unidesk announced the general availability of Unidesk 1.0, the company's latest desktop virtualization management platform. The new solution leverages best-of-breed VMware vSphere virtualization technology and extends virtual desktop solutions such as VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop.
Unidesk 1.0 offers what the company calls "100% Personalization," which is said to help drive end-user acceptance of virtual desktops by sustaining user customizations. These customizations include user-installed applications, profile customizations, and documents. It also provides single image management, creating and updating many desktops from single images of Microsoft Windows and applications. And it provides storage savings for IT organizations by shrinking the amount of storage needed to implement a desktop virtualization solution by preventing duplicate copies of Microsoft Windows and IT-managed applications from being stored.
[ Also on InfoWorld: AppSense provides user virtualization solutions to help with desktop virtualization adoption, and Trend Micro offers a new VDI-optimized security solution. ]
With Unidesk 1.0, the company also announced its Unidesk Composite Virtualization technology -- the company's patent-pending layering technology used to ensure desktop virtual desktop success.
To gain a better understanding as to what Unidesk is doing, and to find out more about their layering technology, I went directly to the source and spoke with Ron Oglesby, chief solution architect at Unidesk.
InfoWorld: For folks who haven't yet heard about Unidesk 1.0, how would you describe it?
Unidesk: Unidesk is true desktop layering done at the file system level. The idea is to provide virtual desktop management by essentially slicing a desktop C: Drive into numerous layers that IT can manage and version as single instances. While we do this we still allow the users to retain full control of the desktop up to and including user-installed applications. So the user gets a full desktop experience, but IT has a desktop they can manage as if it was a single image.
InfoWorld: How is this layering technology different from the other "layers" we hear about from other vendors? What makes your solution unique?
