While everybody waits to know if IBM will swallow Sun, Sun continues to execute its (controversial) virtualization strategy.
The third version of its VDI connection broker, simply called VDI, is finally ready.
Announced in January, as expected the product introduces support for xVM VirtualBox, the hosted VMM that Sun acquired from innotek in February 2008.
As previously highlighted, it’s unclear why Sun believes that its customers may want to run a resource hog like a virtual desktop infrastructure on top of a platform that is much slower than a hypervisor.
The reason can’t be the price: even if VirtualBox is free there are several free hypevisors available at this point.
Anyway there are other features that are more interesting:
- the support for Microsoft RDP remoting protocol (finally!)
- the support for Microsoft Active Directory
- the integration with Solaris ZFS
Sun is pricing this version at $40 per concurrent user / year.