Enterprise Desktop Virtualisation

This session was all about the "sixth" piece of MDOP. The Kidaro acquisition is not due to complete until May, so there are no release dates yet. They also confirmed that the pricing of MDOP will not change when this component is added in, always a surprise from Microsoft!

So onto the product itself, which is fairly clever. At a high level, it is basically a 'hidden' virtual PC installation running windows XP or Vista. Applications that are 'published' from the hidden virtual OS are presented seamlessly on the user's host PC. This could potentially be used to deliver an SDS XP experience on a non-standard workstation (e.g. contractor laptop). It's also the technology that was used to run the USB demo at the end of the keynote that Mat has already mentioned.

The product adds usability to the Virtual PC application in a number of ways. Firstly, the virtual machine is hidden, so the user experience is seamless. Updates to the VM image can be done on the fly, and the update mechanism promises to be very light on bandwidth as the agent checks if any of the updated components already exist on the host machine and only transfers the differences.

While it is very cool technology, I have to wonder about the horsepower required on the desktop to run this acceptably, and there are still a bunch of unanswered questions on how licensing will work.

We should definitely watch this space!