Quest Software recently signed an agreement to license source code from Liquidware Labs, a desktop transformation solution provider founded by David Bieneman, who earlier founded Vizioncore, a virtualization backup and management company that was acquired by Quest back in 2007.

With this new agreement in place, Quest was able to release its own Quest branded utility, VDI Assessment, which is a free product designed to help identify which physical desktops and users within an organization are best suited to be migrated over to a VDI or desktop virtualization environment.

Quest said it was making this technology available as a free download with the hopes of empowering IT departments to perform their own assessments, rather than require an organization to enlist the help of a professional services engagement. Doing so, the company expects to see faster adoption of desktop virtualization in all its forms, and it hopes to provide clear guidance as to which users and desktops these organizations should virtualize first.

Assessment tools like this are becoming an important -- and required -- component for any successful VDI desktop deployment. Kicking off any VDI project requires proper planning. Furthermore, any good plan should first determine which desktops, users, and applications are a good fit to be migrated from a physical environment to a virtual environment, as well as the candidates that should not be moved.

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Read the rest of this article at the InfoWorld Virtualization Report.