| Unity In VMware Workstation To Unite SBC and VDI? |
| Saturday, 22 December 2007 by Michel Roth | |||
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Unity is a really interesting feature. What is Unity? Unity is for VMware Workstation what seamless windows are for Presentation Server. With Unity you can run virtual machines seamless, meaning that you only see the application you start, in stead on the entire virtual machine. The resemblance with seamless windows is striking. With seamless windows in Presentation Server you see just the application, not the entire (Windows 2003 "physical") desktop. To me Unity is a confirmation to something I have felt strongly about ever since VDI became popular. SBC and VDI are not that different. Think about it: what is VDI really? In a nutshell it's hosting a WindowsXP / Windows Vista desktop on a virtual platform (like ESX) and using RDP or ICA to connect to it. If that is called VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), then running a Citrix server on VMware should be called VSI: Virtual Server Infrastructure. So it's clear to see that these technologies are very similar. This is why I think that in about 3 to 5 years there will be no difference between SBC or VDI. Perhaps this will be called DBAD? Datacenter based Application Delivery? It would make perfect sense for the Unity feature to make it into future versions of ESX. That would be very interesting. VDI is maturing rapidly. First there was Citrix that allowed for creating seamless applications, then there came Provision Networks (now Quest) that took this one step further and allowed you to create a published application from an application installed onto a (virtual) Windows XP desktop. Now there's VMware that allows you to publish that same application using Unity. The line is starting to blur. What's next? Read more about VMware Unity.
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