Vmware announces a whole host of updates

VIRTUALISATION GIANT Vmware proudly announced its new Virtual Desktop Manager 2.1 today, boasting increased scalability and full multimedia content within a virtual machine environment.

After wading through pages of waffly PR, the INQ can reveal that Vmware is claiming that its Virtual Desktop Manager 2 (VDM 2), the firm’s next generation connection broker, has placed rather a lot of importance on multimedia content. And scalability. Yes, it took Vmware four pages to get that across.

The company reckons that a maximum of 5,000 concurrent users can now be supported per VDI cluster, in what it sees a new scale-up of virtual desktop deployments. VDI, or virtual desktop infrastructure, means that remote clients can be hooked up to centralised virtual desktops, fairly securely, from pretty much anywhere, on a plethora of different hardware platforms. So, with the new update, Vmware believes that now literally hundreds of desktop virtual machines can be created within a single storage pool.

The firm’s emphasis on multimedia, which Vmware believes users should be able to access from anywhere and everywhere, means that certain multi-media codecs can now be redirected to the local PC for rendering of full motion video and audio on XP desktops.

Designed mainly for corporate desktop clients, the updates also include German and Japanese versions and a new transaction-logging capability which Vmware touts as being important for improving management. (Improving management? Sounds too good to be true… we’ll take three please.)

Vice president of Vmware’s desktop products and solutions, Jeff Jennings, noted that companies tended to like virtual desktops because “they're better protected from disaster, disruption, attack, and theft”. He added that because they are also centralised, “they're also radically easier to manage, less costly to support, and faster to provision".

Vmware also decided to announce an upgrade to its application virtualisation software today, a move which should end up lowering the cost of deploying new desktop programs to end users.

The upgrade would let IT departments package desktop applications into just one executable file, allowing end users to run it without in any way changing their host machine's operating system.

The software, ThinApp 4, should be on sale by the middle of next month and is thought to be stiff competition for the Vole’s Application Virtualisation software. µ