Virtualisation and optimised desktops the Microsoft way

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 27 May 2008 07:11

Business IT - Technology

Watch out VMware and Citrix: Microsoft’s wants its value-added virtualisation strategy to turn victorious one of these days, and has not only bought up Kidaro to boost its Optimised Desktop pack but continues investing big money, saying its seeing big success.
A recent entry at the Windows Vista Team Blog sees Microsoft boasting that its virtualisation strategies are going to plan, with its “Microsoft Optimised Desktop Pack” or MDOP getting lots of internal attention – and subsequent sales.

Or so says Microsoft, who promotes that the Optimised Desktop is a “framework is based on technologies that enable decoupling the traditional desktop stack of hardware, operating system, applications, data, settings and user profiles, making desktop management more efficient and easing change and user migration.”

Hyper-V, System Center and now the newly updated MDOP all work together, Microsoft says, to “create a flexible desktop environment - one where users can log on to any managed PC connected to the corporate network and have the same familiar environment and access to applications and data, while enabling IT departments to reduce costs and deliver applications and data services that are compliant with their data security and regulatory requirements.”

Which all sounds great, although there can be no doubt that VMware and Citrix will happily say they have solutions to provide a very similar set of benefits. Still, that’s competition, and it’s good – would you have it any other way? I wouldn’t.

MDOP is meant to deliver Microsoft Application Virtualization, Advanced Group Policy Management, an Asset Inventory Service, a Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset and Desktop Error Monitoring.

Microsoft says it has already invested more than $400 million in “developing and expanding MDOP thus far”, and thanks to the finalisation of the Kidaro Technologies acquisition, MDOP will soon be poised to offer “a seamless combination of applications running from within both a host and guest OS”.

The blog post explains that: “This technology will help enable end users to run applications from multiple versions of Windows at the same time, with seamless windowing and menus, and without the confusion of logging into and seeing multiple virtual machine desktops”.

“The product teams are working closely with our new colleagues from Kidaro to incorporate the desktop virtualization technologies into MDOP in the first half of 2009, under the new product name Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization. We will continue investing here because we know manageability is fundamental to broad corporate use of desktop virtualization,” says the blog post.

Please read on to page 2.