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March 12, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today announced its intended acquisition of Kidaro, a leading provider of desktop virtualization solutions for enterprises. In combining Kidaro’s virtualization technology with its suite of desktop management tools, known as the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance, Microsoft will enable IT professionals to optimize their desktop infrastructure by providing management capabilities for Virtual PCs, streamlining deployments and easing application compatibility issues.

Turning Virtualization Into Tangible Benefits

Managing desktops across an enterprise can be time-consuming, complex and costly. Adding Kidaro’s desktop virtualization capabilities to the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack suite will provide Microsoft Software Assurance customers who have purchased the add-on subscription with the enhanced ability to do the following:

• Accelerate Windows Vista migrations by minimizing compatibility issues between applications and the operating system
• Easily deploy managed Virtual PCs to Windows desktops
• Drive business continuity by enabling rapid reconstitution of corporate desktops
• Minimize the tension between IT control and user flexibility by applying policies in locked-down corporate Virtual PCs while giving users more open access to the underlying host operating system
• Speed user adoption of desktop virtualization by making Virtual PCs “invisible” to end users
• Reduce IT investment in desktop image management by delivering virtual images independent of hardware or local desktop configuration

“Virtualization technology has tremendous potential to help companies reduce costs and increase control over their desktops, while simultaneously delivering benefits to end users,” said Kevin Brown, chief executive officer of Kidaro. “By adding Kidaro’s technology to Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, Microsoft can deliver sophisticated virtual desktop capabilities and management to a wide variety of enterprise customers.”

Kidaro technologies will be incorporated into future updates of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance, which currently includes five key technologies that help enterprises manage their desktops:

• Microsoft Application Virtualization
• Microsoft Asset Inventory Service
• Microsoft Advanced Group Policy Management
• Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset
• Microsoft System Center Desktop Error Monitoring

How does Kidaro concept work?

As you can see it has different options how to deliver the vm image to the end user. a) DVD –”one-click”, streamlined deployment of the corporate virtual machine, with no user intervention, b)Kidaro ToGo - an encrypted corporate desktop, carried anywhere on a USB drive or iPod and c) Trim Transfer™– advanced de-duplication technology accelerates download of initial and updated VM images over the LAN or WAN. Finally Microsoft is going to have some kind of centralized and managed solution integrated in to their suite of virtualization products. I personally would like to see this as a System Center suite than having to purchase the MDOP from Software Assurance. Very challenging to see Microsoft is having a solution on the horizon but on the other end VMWare ACE Management server is out for a while. I am looking forward to see how things are going to work and I will keep you updated once the product is being integrated and made for public through the connect website. For more information on Kidaro please go to this website.

In the overview below I have summarized small list of supported features of my favorite desktop virtualization products. Hopefully this overview will help you decide which of those you should evaluate. Microsoft has Virtual PC 2007 which is for free but VMWare Workstation and Parallel Workstation have features which are missing in Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007.  Parallels Workstation license is $50 and the VMWare Workstation is $190 so depending on your requirements you should be able to make a good choice. For more details check the virtualization/desktop page which has more information.

For me personally I would choose VMWare Workstation because of the following reasons:

• Support of x64 bits virtual machines. The main reason for this you can install Exchange Server 2007 64bit and test the product. I have been running Exchange Server 2007 for 6 months now in a vm guest with 2GB ram and it works great.
• Support for running ESX server into a virtual machine. I have been testing for a while with ESX server and using the VMWare Workstation solution. It helped me to get more familiarized with the ESX server and it’s components. ESX3i and ESX3.5 can be installed in a virtual machine with VMWare Workstation but the virtual machines can not be powered on. Update: 2008/11/06 –> VMWare Workstation 6.5 supports VMWare ESX3.5i and ESX 3.5 to be installed and virtual machines to be started.
• USB2.0 support. I redirected dozen of USB devices into my virtual machines for testing. One example was having a USB ADSL modem and the drivers were not available for Windows Vista; so I got my Windows XP virtual machine booted; redirected the USB ADSL model to my virtual machine; installed the drivers and I was able to browse the Internet. Redirected my finger print reader and tested the software on Windows Vista and Windows XP virtual machines, etc.
• Team of virtual machines. Neat feature and really useful when building a test lab with different kind of virtual machines (domain controller, dns, isa and exchange).