VMware has acquired certain assets from RTO Software, a provider of user profile management for Windows desktop and application/performance monitoring tools for desktop virtualization, to enable effective persona management for VMware View.
RTO Software is a company with core expertise in user profile management and application-focused performance monitoring tools that improve user experience and performance of VDI or terminal server environments. RTO Software solutions are used on thousands of servers around the world in a variety of industries, including financial management, manufacturing, healthcare, telecommunications, and government. RTO Software products include:
• Virtual Profiles – profile management
• PinPoint – application performance monitoring targeting Citrix solutions
• Discover – IT assets management solution
• TScale – applicaenvironments
VMware officially announced the acquisition with a blog post on their Community Web site under VMware View:
Today we are proud to announce that VMware has acquired the assets of Alpharetta, GA based RTO Software adding their technology and talented people to the VMware View team...
The RTO technologies add a critical component to the View solution providing the foundation for robust persona management. With persona management end-user specific information such as user data, settings and application access is separated from the desktop image enabling increased flexible access and portability of the desktop service. This integration will provide end-users with a consistent user experience while IT organizations will benefit from simplified and optimized management of these assets.
Scott Davis, the VMware View CTO gives a bit more clarification about what RTO offers with Virtual Profiles:
This is an exciting technology. For those unfamiliar with the specifics of what Virtual Profiles actually does, the technology seamlessly virtualizes, caches and synchronizes a desktop user's roaming profile, while improving both the performance and data integrity of the profile. When a user logs on, instead of monolithically delivering the entire user profile and making the user wait for all of it, Virtual Profiles performs a "just-in-time" delivery. Windows thinks the entire profile is present, however the contents of each segment or file is brought down and subsequently cached when accessed. When files are updated and closed, Virtual Profiles automatically synchronizes the files with the profile server, maintaining data integrity across user sessions in real-time and speeding up logoffs. This preserves user configuration integrity independently of the desktop image; and also propagates those changes to any other concurrent user sessions that may exist, maintaining data integrity across sessions as well. Registry updates are handled in a similar manner; but at finer granularity. Profile registry changes are automatically synchronized with the stored profile on the server. Since only what has been written to the registry locally is copied back, hive corruption is prevented.