Yesterday, Unidesk announced the general availability of Unidesk 1.0, the company's latest desktop virtualization management platform. The new solution leverages best-of-breed VMware vSphere virtualization technology and extends virtual desktop solutions such as VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop.

Unidesk 1.0 offers what the company calls "100% Personalization," which is said to help drive end-user acceptance of virtual desktops by sustaining user customizations. These customizations include user-installed applications, profile customizations, and documents. It also provides single image management, creating and updating many desktops from single images of Microsoft Windows and applications. And it provides storage savings for IT organizations by shrinking the amount of storage needed to implement a desktop virtualization solution by preventing duplicate copies of Microsoft Windows and IT-managed applications from being stored.

I was fortunate to find out more information about what Unidesk was doing and what they were offering when I spoke to the company's Chief Solutions Architect, Ron Oglesby.  Check out my latest InfoWorld Virtualization Report Q&A: 

InfoWorld: For folks who haven't yet heard about Unidesk 1.0, how would you describe it?

Unidesk: Unidesk is true desktop layering done at the file system level. The idea is to provide virtual desktop management by essentially slicing a desktop C: Drive into numerous layers that IT can manage and version as single instances. While we do this we still allow the users to retain full control of the desktop up to and including user-installed applications. So the user gets a full desktop experience, but IT has a desktop they can manage as if it was a single image.

InfoWorld: How is this layering technology different from the other "layers" we hear about from other vendors? What makes your solution unique?

Unidesk: The simple answer is the level at which we do our layering. Most often the term "layer" is used to describe managing portions of a desktop, for example: the OS layer, the application layer, the user work space layer. But really, each of these is managed with agents or software running in Windows that pushes changes to the C: Drive, or tries to scrape user settings from the drive in order to move them to a "new" drive later on. In our case, we work below Windows instead of trying to change it. Our layers are not dependent on something running in Windows, or the administrator being aware of changes users are making. We build our layers at the file system level, which allows us to capture and manage any change in the environment throughout the desktop's lifecycle.

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Read the rest of this interview at the InfoWorld Virtualization Report.  For those of you that know Ron Oglesby, you know this technology has to be worthwhile.  And you know he is a good interview as well.  Enjoy!