Is Symantec moving to workspace virtualization?

Symantec made its own splash into the virtualization market back in January 2007 with the acquisition of Altiris and its application virtualization software, Software Virtualization Solution (SVS). And then during 2008, the company picked up AppStream and nSuite to help start rounding out the company’s EndPoint Virtualization business.

So what’s next for Symantec? How are they going to play with VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft?

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Over at the official Symantec Juice Web site, a community member mentioned a piece of news coming out of the Symantec Beta community. Evidently, Symantec has an upcoming Beta program around something called Symantec Workspace Virtualization (SWV), possibly taking the place of SVS, and jumping the versioning number from 2.1 to 6.1, probably to coincide with the new versioning of Symantec’s other Altiris products like Deployment Server and Notification Server.

SWV is reported as an application virtualization solution that eliminates the need to install or manage applications on individual devices, making application testing, provisioning, management, and support easier and less costly.

Some of the key features being reported in the solution include:

• Dependent Layers – Some applications depend on other applications, whether virtualized or not. SWV allows you to specify another layer as a dependent layer. If an application needs functionality found in a dependent layer, SWV will automatically activate that layer if it is not activated.
• Application Isolation – Allows administrators to further isolate their applications by “turning off” visibility between virtualized applications and/or the underlying operating system. SWV virtualizes what matters, reduces conflicts where they occur, and increases productivity by leveraging SWV’s inherent architectural advantages.
• Multi User – SWV 6.1 supports multiple users on the same PC that is applicable to two specific scenarios. The first scenario is that customers would like to virtualize applications in Terminal Server / Citrix environments. The second scenario is that customers would like to virtualize applications for multiple people using the same PC. Virtualized applications can be customized to each user on the system.
• Layers Patching – SWV 6.1 provides enterprise-level patch capability by enabling customers to add/patch a layer in an incremental way without removing or replacing the original layer.

There is no word yet on when this new solution will be made available.