Sun has announced a virtual-desktop system with the release of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 2.0. With VDI, administrators running VMWare’s virtualization solutions can provide a range of desktops to users running Intel x86 hardware or Sun’s dedicated thin-client machines.
VDI 2.0 features the new Sun Virtual Desktop Connector, which supports Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS, Linux and Sun’s Solaris operating systems.
The software allows organizations to “provide their users with secure access to a centralized desktop environment that can be accessed from practically any location, at any time, via the corporate network,” said Jim McHugh, vice president of Solaris marketing.
The software offers improved information security, more effective control of access to critical data, reduced operational costs and increased employee mobility, McHugh added.
VDI 2.0 is the result of a deal with VMWare, announced last month, to offer and support VMWare infrastructure virtualization software on Sun hardware. Sun demonstrated VMI 2.0 in announcing that deal.
The software seems to build on years of Sun’s work on thin clients, said Charles King, principal analyst for Pund-IT, in a telephone interview. Internally, Sun has for some years operated “remote office centers,” outfitted with Sun’s Sun Ray clients. Employees simply swipe an employee ID through a card reader “and your desktop comes up from a central data center,” King said. “It sounds like what they’ve done here is partner with VMWare to run on the back end and incorporate that with” the desktop-serving application.
What Sun is offering with VMI 2.0 is “basically the thin-client model, just utilizing virtualization on the back end to get better performance than you would get on a thin client,” he said.
Desktop virtualization makes a huge amount of sense, not least because of the reduction in energy consumption. “With virtual desktop environments, you can take a…