Another great day at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco. This morning’s keynote featured VMware’s CTO Steve Herrod explaining VMware’s vision for end user computing (EUC). We’re in the middle of a fundamental shift in EUC, where the days of IT telling users what to do are over. IT needs to respond with new, transformative technologies to broker, secure, and deliver the apps and data that users are demanding to any device, anytime, anywhere. To accomplish this, VMware has highlighted a few of their technologies in their growing EUC portfolio.
The first is VMware View, VMware’s desktop virtualization solution. View provides a simple-to-use centralized desktop platform that helps organizations realize tighter security, better performance, and disaster recovery options for desktop computing environments. VMware View 5.1, released earlier this year, brought greater simplicity, performance, and improved user experience to the solution.
Next, Steve Herrod highlighted VMware’s recent acquisition, Wanova Mirage. Mirage is a pretty slick technology that allows IT to layer the various pieces of a desktop environment – OS, apps, data – for simplified deployment and management of desktop/laptop assets. Mirage fills the void of managing offline and mobile assets, while allowing the desktop computing environment to utilize all of the horsepower of today’s modern PC equipment. Mirage also brings new options for desktop DR, deployment, and upgrade.
A cool demo of Mirage in action grabbed everyone’s attention – an in-place upgrade of a mobile user’s Windows XP laptop to Windows 7, complete with application and user data migration. When the user lost his laptop, the same image he was using on his laptop was pushed, with Mirage, to View where the user could quickly resume work from his iPad with all his apps and data in place.
VMware also showcased what they are calling Project AppShift for User Interface Virtualization (UIV). UIV provides a slick overlay, giving tablet users an optimized UI for interacting with Windows, including touch, gestures, and mobile-friendly menus. This will make the View experience from Android and iPad tablets much better.
Finally, the creation of VMware Horizon Suite was announced. The Horizon Suite brings together Horizon Application Manager, AppBlast, Project Octopus (now called Horizon Data) and Horizon Mobile into one solution suite.
- Horizon Application Manager 1.5, which was released earlier in the year, provides an enterprise app store for single signon to SaaS apps and deployment of Windows ThinApp’s.
- AppBlast – a technology demo’d last year as a way to stream any app to any device via HTML5 has now become a platform/protocol for streaming desktops, apps, and objects within Horizon.
- Horizon Data – a ‘DropBox for the Enterprise’ solution has been revamped after extensive beta feedback earlier this year. Horizon Data will deliver consolidated file sharing to any device, while keeping data secure in the corporate datacenter with a flexible set of policies and quotas that IT can leverage to secure data.
- Horizon Mobile was discussed, with both Android device virtualization and iOS ‘containerization’ of apps and data, allowing IT to deploy apps and secure data on Bring Your Own Device mobile environments.
These technologies will be in beta later this year, and General Availability expected in the first half of 2012.
Tonight, Clearpath will be hosting a customer dinner for those who are in attendance at VMworld. We’re looking forward to discussing these new technologies with our customers as we work together to map virtualization strategies against this weeks announcments.
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