Quest advances its virtualization strategy with vWorkspace 6.0

Quest Software continues to advance its virtualization strategy to the marketplace. Early on, the software company seemed to be happy being behind the scenes in the virtualization market with its involvement and investments in companies like Vizioncore and Invirtus being somewhat secretive. But now, the Quest umbrella is seen as a virtualization power player. And the company looks to be positioning and organizing itself better in this market by creating groups such as its Desktop Virtualization Group.

Within that group, the company recently announced the general availability of its platform-agnostic virtual desktop management solution, Quest vWorkspace 6.0. The technology comes to Quest by way of its acquisition of Provision Networks back in September of 2007. The product was previously branded as Provision Networks Virtual Access Suite.

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But besides going through a re-branding effort and name change to the solution, vWorkspace 6.0 introduces quite a few new important features.

To add flexibility to virtual desktop management, Quest vWorkspace adds support and fully integrates and automates application delivery, desktop deployment, and management from a number of relevant solutions. Not only does it support VMware ESX, but it also supports Virtual Iron and Microsoft’s Hyper-V. And they’ve also added full integration and automation with Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, which is particularly well-suited for desktop deployments due to its native scalable single-image management capabilities and minimal storage requirements.

Comprehensive management capabilities are useless without a strong user experience. If virtual desktops cannot deliver a local-like PC experience to end-users, it isn’t much good to them. To answer that challenge, vWorkspace extends its Experience Optimized Protocol (EOP) to offer multimedia acceleration (multimedia content is redirected to both Windows and Linux end-points for local playback), increased graphics acceleration (performance is enhanced by as much as 800% over the native display protocol), latency reduction (delivers local text echoing to ensure immediate keystroke feedback), and enhanced bi-direction audio (enabling VoIP capabilities).

The new version also improves provisioning and automation:

• Desktop Lifecycle Management — automates the provisioning and mass production of desktops and servers from a single golden image, including Active Directory (AD) integration, while also automating the deletion of desktops and their removal from AD upon expiration
• Delegated Administration Management — essential for large-scale deployments, enables the logical presentation of desktop infrastructure assets in geographic zones and allows fine-grained delegated administrative responsibility among staff members
• Desktop Integrity Management — automates the reversal of the desktop state to its original condition upon reboot

“Version 6.0 significantly changes the connection broker landscape. We are not only delivering the most comprehensive set of management capabilities, but also responding to real-world requirements, whereby user experience needs eclipse any advances in manageability,” states Paul Ghostine, vice president and general manager of Quest’s Desktop Virtualization Group. “Our Experience Optimized Protocol delivers best-in-class performance for a wide variety of applications and use cases.”