Quest signs agreement with Liquidware Labs for VDI assessment technology

Quest Software recently signed an agreement to license source code from Liquidware Labs, a desktop transformation solution provider founded by David Bieneman, who earlier founded Vizioncore, a virtualization backup and management company that was acquired by Quest back in 2007.

With this new agreement in place, Quest was able to release its own Quest branded utility, VDI Assessment, which is a free product designed to help identify which physical desktops and users within an organization are best suited to be migrated over to a VDI or desktop virtualization environment.

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Quest said it was making this technology available as a free download with the hopes of empowering IT departments to perform their own assessments, rather than require an organization to enlist the help of a professional services engagement. Doing so, the company expects to see faster adoption of desktop virtualization in all its forms, and it hopes to provide clear guidance as to which users and desktops these organizations should virtualize first.

Assessment tools like this are becoming an important — and required — component for any successful VDI desktop deployment. Kicking off any VDI project requires proper planning. Furthermore, any good plan should first determine which desktops, users, and applications are a good fit to be migrated from a physical environment to a virtual environment, as well as the candidates that should not be moved.

The basic idea is that you install the assessment tool in your existing environment. Over a period of 30 days or more, the software will gather important data about the environment, analyzing both desktop performance and user behavior over time in order to build up a complete picture of application usage and resource consumption across the organization. It can help determine which users or desktops can be moved over to a VDI environment or which applications may cause problems if moved — basically, it takes the guesswork out of the deployment process by identifying for you the best targets for success.

The performance metrics collected during the assessment can evaluate how well the infrastructure will perform when moving to a virtual desktop solution such as Quest vWorkspace, VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop, and/or Windows 7. In addition, questions of sizing and scaling, infrastructure needs, and TCO/ROI can be more easily quantified.

Some of the assessment features being called out specifically by Quest include the ability to:

• Determine which users and desktops are a best fit for VDI, Terminal Server/RD Session Host, Application Virtualization, and physical PCs
• Comprehensively analyze and create detailed reports of current network, user, and application usage
• Assess the viability of a Windows 7 deployment via desktop virtualization
• Pre-determine desktop, network, data center, and storage needs before the virtualization project begins so that IT departments can build an effective plan and ensure success

Right now, the company is offering its Quest VDI Assessment tool as a free download. Although the tool is listed as freeware, the license key downloaded is only good for 45 days. After that, you must contact someone at Quest in order to continue to use the software once it has expired. According to Quest, an account representative will provide a new key that will preserve the data collected during the initial 45-day time period; however, not much else is known beyond that. One would hope that even beyond the 45-day period, the product would remain free of charge.

We know there is no formal support being provided by the company’s technical support staff. All help will be coming from the company’s community site, but that’s usually expected from a free product. The key here is to make this utility easy to use and understand since there is no formal support and there aren’t any services people holding your hand through the process.

Quest isn’t the first company to become enamored with Liquidware Labs’ VDI assessment capabilities. In August, VMware signed an agreement with Liquidware Labs so that VMware’s Professional Services Desktop Virtualization practice could make use of the company’s Stratusphere desktop visibility and assessment platform. Much like VMware, Dell Services is also now working with Liquidware Labs to help guide its own clients along the desktop virtualization journey. The server giant signed its agreement with Liquidware Labs one month earlier than VMware, in July.

With Quest Software, VMware, and Dell already signed up to use Liquidware Labs’ Stratusphere software, the bigger question might be who isn’t planning to use Liquidware Labs’ technology to do VDI assessments. What else is out there? At this point, what else is being offered as a free download without requiring a services engagement to babysit the process with you?

Available now for download, the free Quest VDI Assessment utility can be used to start testing your own environment.

This article, “Quest signs OEM agreement with Liquidware Labs for VDI assessment technology,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.