The Butler Group research firm released a 7-pages technical analysis paper about Altiris Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) 2.0, providing this conclusion:
Altiris SVS is a well developed solution to combating ‘DLL hell’ in the Windows environment, however, it also provides an excellent tool for ensuring that desktop management is optimised and support costs minimised. Offering organisations a different approach to managing applications on the desktop, Altiris SVS represents a significantly different perspective to that offered by hardware virtualisation solutions. Application virtualisation lacks the resource balancing capabilities offered with hardware virtualisation, but Altiris has worked closely with VMWare so its SVS product operates in a physical or virtual hardware environment where it benefits from the resource balancing capabilities offered by products such as VMWare Infrastructure 3. This capability makes Altiris SVS a versatile solution that provides organisations with management tools to perform desktop operating system migrations and desktop application management simpler and more cost effective.
Butler Group considers that Altiris SVS meets the requirements of managing the desktop applications extremely well; we particularly like the simple filter driver approach to virtualising the applications as this removes the need for organisations to change the infrastructure to accommodate the move to a virtual world. Butler Group believes the weaknesses in the product, especially the lack of support for thin client, server applications, and operating system patch management, are all of secondary importance. Altiris has stated that many of these will be supported by the next major release of SVS scheduled for mid 2007.
It’s very short and seems more a small review (excluding title page, summary page and contact page it’s just a 4-pages brief overview) than a technical assessment. But Altiris claims this is an independent analysis so someone may want to take a look.
Download it here.