Virtual Office Resource

VDIworks, a provider of virtual desktop management and enablement products, announced the release of a new systems management utility called Protocol Inspector intended for IT administrators implementing desktop virtualization.

Company officials say Protocol Inspector makes it “incredibly simple to scan large networks and find and report on all systems that allow remote connections.”

The solution can be used by professional services groups conducting site surveys prior to the deployment of a VDI system. It is also useful to corporate IT administrators who want to routinely check their network to ensure that VMs and physical systems are available for users to connect to. Finally Protocol Inspector also helps managers generate graphical and tabular reports with the tool.

According to Amir Husain, president and CEO of VDIworks, administrators and professional services engineers need a toolkit of utilities designed to make virtual desktop installations simpler, quicker and easier. Protocol Inspector, according to Husain, will become a key part of this toolkit.

VDIworks Protocol Inspector allows multi-subnet scans of a network to discover systems that implement any one of several remote desktop or VDI protocols, company officials said. The solution does not require any agents to be installed on target systems.

Once individual systems have been discovered, they are checked to determine whether they run any of the following protocols: VDIworks VideoOverIP, Microsoft (News - Alert) RDP, HP RGS, Citrix ICA, VNC or PC-over-IP. Protocol Inspector provides an easy-to-interpret graphical view of the distribution of protocols on the network.

Earlier last September VDIworks had announced the optimization of VideoOverIP desktop remoting protocol for Hyper-V, as a solution to bring paralleled user experience to Microsoft’s Virtualization Platform.

Protocol Inspector is useful in many scenarios, according to company officials, for example, if administrators want to perform an initial audit of a network to determine which systems have RDP enabled and which don’t.

It may also become helpful if a professional services engineer wants to see the distribution of machines that will support higher-end multimedia experiences with protocols such as VDIworks VideoOverIP or HP RGS, versus those that are better used for graphics-limited scenarios.

Protocol Inspector can also be used as a simple way of reporting on uptime/availability by checking whether all physical and virtual machines are up and running exposing the right protocol set, company officials added.