VMware to target desktops and hardware integration

VMware has today unveiled new desktop tools and partner hardware developments on the second day of its VMworld European user conference.

Diane Green, VMware president and chief executive officer said in her opening keynote of the event that the vendor's roadmap had moved from testing and development to the point where 84 per cent of its customers use its platform it their production IT environments.

Referring to the four new management tools announced yesterday, Greene said: "Now we are getting into the automation phase of our roadmap, which is needed to add the management of all those virtual machines into IT service delivery management."

But Greene preferred to share the stage with VMware's hardware vendors and concentrate on desktop virtualisation. "We are addressing the pain points of managing desktops with virtualisation," she said.

New scalable virtual image technology has been designed to enable link cloning of a master image, so patches and updates can be applied to it and then rolled out to multiple, individual desktop systems, saving administration time.

Greene also demonstrated a new tool to allow users to take access their hosted or local desktop PCs. "I would have liked to use my own laptop offline before, but found there were too may manual steps involved to sync data when you go offline and online," she said.

The new desktop offering, which will be available soon, is designed to automate the access to individual desktops on- and offline through its virtual machine offerings wherever the user is in the world.

The last new desktop announcement focused on application virtualisation, using the technology of recently acquired, Thinstall [check] to allow users to quickly load files into applications that are not already installed on a desktop.

In the keynote demonstration, Greene was able to use this new tool to open a Microsoft Visio document onto a laptop using the application from a USB key. "With these technologies, we now have the ability to run virtual machines from anywhere and, for unique application use, application virtualisation capabilities as well," she said.

The keynote also included announcements from hardware partners. IBM said it had set new application benchmarking records by running 16,000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes on the VMware Infrastructure platform on an eight-core IBM System X server.

HP said it was embedding the VMware ESX 3i hypervisor into its ProLiant server range, as well as working to integrate its IT service management software with VMware's management suite to offer more granular service monitoring. And Dell also said it was embedding VMware's hypervisor into its PowerEdge server range, as well as making 3i available for download to existing customers of the Blade server range.

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