Virtual desktops are likely to become a more attractive proposition for businesses following VMware’s acquisition of application virtualisation vendor Thinstall and ClearCube Technology’s separate release of an update to its Sentral management suite. ClearCube said it now offers much of what IT departments need to manage an infrastructure that includes virtual machines.

Corporate interest has been growing in virtual desktops, whereby employees have access to virtual client machines running in a datacentre, rather than their own
physical PC. This method of consolidation is said to combine the security and manageability benefits of server-based computing, while still giving each user their own desktop environment.

VMware has been helping firms to virtualise systems for years, but only recently acquired the tools to deploy and manage client systems as virtual machines through its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). With Thinstall, VMware has now given customers the ability to provision such virtual machines with applications as required.

“By combining with application virtualisation, we can seamlessly customise and personalise VDI desktops on demand,” said Tommy Armstrong, VMware’s senior product marketing manager in Europe.

Thinstall’s technology makes it easier to deploy applications by encapsulating each inside its own environment. The result is a single executable file providing all the application resources, without the need to update the registry.

With VDI and Thinstall, VMware said it will in future offer customers the ability to populate a virtual machine with applications at login, based on the user’s credentials.
“You can have a small number of templates, but still provide the applications the user wants. It’s an efficient way to give users a rich experience, setting VDI apart from other technologies,” said Armstrong. He added that Thinstall will operate as a subsidiary of VMware, and the Thinstall technology will continue to be available separately.

In a research note published in January, analyst firm Gartner said the Thinstall acquisition should strengthen VMware’s position in the market and add to VDI’s flexibility, enabling the company to offer more configurable options for application isolation. Gartner added it believes VMware will maintain Thinstall’s momentum during 2008 and exploit opportunities created by Vista migrations.

Meanwhile, ClearCube Technology has made available version 5.6 of its Sentral management suite, which now offers administrators a single management framework to monitor and control their entire centralised infrastructure, according to the firm, including both physical and virtual machines alike.

Sentral began life as a management console for ClearCube’s PC blade systems, but the firm made it available for third-party hardware.

Version 5.6 extends the suite’s capabilities to include connection brokering, load balancing and monitoring hardware health. Thanks to its partnership with VMware, the new version of the suite offers firms a one-stop-shop for managing hardware and
virtual machines from a single console, the firm said.