On the heels of receiving United States patent approval for its RES Virtual Desktop Extender (VDX) technology, RES Software today announced that it will also be offering VDX as a standalone product. Originally a popular feature within RES Workspace Manager (formerly RES PowerFuse), VDX serves as a fundamental component in the successful deployment of virtual desktops. It enables local applications that typically do not run smoothly, or at all, in virtual environments to run seamlessly within a virtual session. This will become even more critical as multimedia and communication-based applications continue increasing their bandwidth-intensive features.
“For years VDX has been a popular and unique feature of RES Workspace Manager among organizations planning virtual desktop deployments,” said Bob Janssen, CTO of RES Software. “Discussions with customers and partners revealed an industry need for standalone version of VDX that would help organizations easily conquer the challenge of delivering fully complete virtual desktops to their users. As a point solution, VDX allows IT departments that were previously unable to leverage the benefits of VDI because of bulky applications to move towards a virtualized environment.”
RES Virtual Desktop Extender provides organizations the unique ability to seamlessly enhance a virtual desktop with applications that run locally. Because applications that end users rely on are merged within a remote desktop into a single desktop, users have no need to switch between multiple sessions. VDX extends the user workspace through independent computing architecture (ICA) and remote desktop protocol (RDP) virtual channels. VDX works with Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, Microsoft Remote Desktop Services and VMware View. It provides a simple, cost-effective way to introduce Bring Your Own PC (BYOPC) models.
Sometimes called ‘reverse seamless,’ VDX technology has already helped hundreds of organizations increase the ease of adoption of virtual desktop and terminal server environments by enabling users to access heavy applications like AutoCAD, Photoshop, diagnostic imaging, custom programs, multimedia (AVI) files and media intensive applications including CD/DVD applications, VoIP and video conferencing applications within their virtual desktops. VDX offers the flexibility for IT to rationalize applications, determining if it makes the most sense to run them locally or in the data center based on their intensity.
Additionally, VDX enables organizations to keep personal user desktop environments separate from the corporate environment, adding a new layer of security for IT. This separation allows IT to host more sensitive applications in the data center, while simultaneously allowing users the freedom to run local applications. IT can control what data can and cannot move between the local and remote sessions. Users can run their preferred applications locally without fear that they will compromise the centrally hosted corporate environment.
“In order to transform our desktop environment and get the most from our investments, the ability to have one view over both our virtual and physical desktops was important to us, especially considering many students required resource-hungry applications like AutoCAD,” said Paul Maddock, IT Director at UK-based Warwickshire College. “We overcame the challenge associated with applications that seemed unsuitable for virtualization by using Virtual Desktop Extender to ‘reverse publish’ those applications installed on the physical desktop back to the virtual environment. This allows us to retain central control over the entire user environment, without compromising application performance for our students.”
VDX also provides users the ability to write a DVD on a local computer from the virtual desktop. This capability is not currently available within today’s virtual desktop technologies.
While currently available as a feature of RES Workspace Manager, the standalone solution will be available in January 2011 and will only require a simple software installation without any configuration.