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Unidesk Adds 5 Hot New Features to VDI Management Platform
[December 07, 2010]

Unidesk Adds 5 Hot New Features to VDI Management Platform


(PR Web Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Marlborough, MA (PRWEB) December 7, 2010 Unidesk has added 5 new features to its virtual desktop management platform to make Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) easier and less costly to implement and manage for IT organizations. The new features include: integration with VMware View 4.5; the ability to create and update non-persistent desktops from single operating system and application images; tighter integration with Pano Logic 3.5; support for virtual desktops using local storage; and enhanced LDAP directory features. Allvdi 5 features are in response to requests from Unidesk’s rapidly growing customer base, and establish a new baseline for virtual desktop management.



VMware View 4.5 integration Unidesk makes it easier for customers to solve their VMware View 4.5 profile and persona management challenges by adding the ability to provision personalized, storage-efficient desktops directly from VMware View pools. Through new API-level integration, administrators can now create VMware View pools, add desktops to existing VMware View pools, and entitle users to VMware View pools from within the Unidesk management interface. All configuration changes made in Unidesk are automatically reflected in VMware View Manager. Unidesk’s unique ability to preserve all end user personalization -- including user-installed applications and plug-ins -- using only a standard local profile eliminates the need for profile management and roaming profiles, as well as their associated cost, complexity and I/O overhead.

According to Eric Piekarczyk, Vice President of Operations at The Solar Company in Castro Valley, Calif., “As one of the most experienced installers of residential and commercial solar panels in California, we are committed to using green technology in our own business. The decision to virtualize our desktops made sense for this reason, and for the operational cost savings we wanted to achieve. But once we started our VDI implementation, we realized that to give our employees the flexibility they want, we’d have to create full-sized virtual machines for every user, which would increase storage costs and complicate patching and application delivery. Unidesk gives us the single image management, storage savings, and full personalization we need in one simple solution, and the new integration with VMware View makes it even easier to deploy and use.” Non-persistent desktops Unidesk can now provision and update both persistent and non-persistent virtual desktops from the same set of centrally managed, shared operating system and application layers. When an end user logs off a non-persistent desktop, all user changes made during the session are deleted, and the virtual machine is returned to a known “good” state ready for the next user. This is especially useful for lab environments and kiosks where different users need to share the same pool of virtual desktops. Unidesk’s storage reduction – up to 70% in most cases – and single image management now apply to both desktop types. Microsoft Windows and application patches and updates to non-persistent and persistent desktops can be performed centrally once, without the overhead of re-provisioning or recomposing desktops, or the complexity of managing multiple templates, gold images or parent virtual machines.


Pano Logic 3.5 integration Unidesk is frequently selected as the VDI management platform for Pano Logic zero clients. Through new API-level integration with the Pano Manager console, administrators can now provision new virtual desktops into Pano collections directly from Unidesk. Operating system and application patches and updates are also completely automated.

“The combination of Unidesk and Pano Logic has been very successful for us as we virtualize more of the desktops across our 12-county region,” said Orrin Garcia, Director of IT at The Workforce Solutions Alamo Board in San Antonio, Texas “We’ve made two follow-on purchases of Unidesk since our initial deployment, in part because of how efficient Unidesk has made our small IT staff, but also because of how responsive they’ve been to our needs. The new support for non-persistent desktops and the tighter integration with Pano Logic are good examples of features we requested that we plan to leverage immediately.” VDI on Local storage Unidesk shatters the myth that expensive SAN storage is the only way to realize the operational, security, and green IT benefits of hosted virtual desktops. IT administrators can now provision and update virtual desktops on direct-attached storage, and ensure complete recoverability in the event of a local host or storage failure. Unidesk CacheCloud layer replication technology ensures all user-installed applications, plug-ins, profile settings, documents, directories, and other personalization components are automatically backed up from each CachePoint virtual appliance to centralized file servers. In the event of an outage, all desktops can be recreated on another host using the Microsoft Windows OS and application layers stored on the Master CachePoint and each user’s backed up personalization layer.

Enhanced LDAP Support Administrators can now search LDAP directories such as Microsoft Active Directory and Novell eDirectory from within Unidesk to quickly locate users for desktop and application assignment. This bolsters Unidesk’s unique position as the only solution enabling organizations to implement VDI directly on Novell eDirectory.

Unidesk can be used as the management platform for any VDI access solution, including VMware View™, Citrix® XenDesktop®, Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS), Pano Logic, and Leostream. Unidesk is available immediately through a rapidly expanding network of Unidesk resellers and system integrators.

“Our entire company is focused on enabling customers to accelerate and expand their VDI deployments,” said Chris Midgley, Unidesk Founder and CTO. “With this latest feature set, we continue to raise the bar for comprehensive virtual desktop management by leveraging our patent-pending desktop layering technology.” About Unidesk Unidesk (http://www.unidesk.com) provides the virtual desktop management software platform that organizations of all sizes require to successfully centralize desktops on data center servers. The company’s patent-pending desktop layering technology works with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) access solutions from VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, and other vendors to sustain personalization for workers who need a customizable user experience, while empowering IT with efficient management of operating system and application updates. Unidesk customers benefit from increased worker productivity and reduced IT operations and data center storage costs. Unidesk is a privately-held company with headquarters in Marlborough, Mass, USA.

# # # Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/12/prweb4872954.htm (c) 2010 PRWEB.COM Newswire

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