In December 2008 Virtual Bridges closed a major deal with IBM to bundle a Linux-friendly version of its Win4VDI connection broker (called VERDE) with Canonical Ubuntu Linux and the IBM Open Collaboration Client Solution (OCCS), which includes Lotus Symphony, Notes and other IBM products.
The deal was especially relevant because this bundle was designed to deliver a VDI solution based on the KVM virtualization platform that Ubuntu embeds. And IBM was the first major ISV to support its enterprise products inside KVM virtual machines.
Eight months later Virtual Bridges, IBM and Canonical are back with VERDE 2.0.
The first new thing in this release is the product strategy: Virtual Bridges completely replaces Win4VDI with VERDE, avoiding to market and sell two different versions of the same connection broker.
The second and most important news is related to a new key component of the package: a client-side virtualization platform.
The press announcement mentions the term client hypervisor, but in this case we are talking about a lightweight Linux distribution with KVM (which is not a hypervisor architecture).
Like over client hypervisors, this one requires Intel VT enabled so it won’t work on some laptops (courtesy of Sony and Intel).
The virtual desktop can be checked out and copied on the local KVM platform, allowing the mobile user to work in a so-called offline VDI mode.
At that point VERDE 2.0 uses a new Self-Managing Auto Replicating Technology (SMART) protocol to synchronize the local virtual desktop image with the primary one that resides inside the corporate virtual infrastructure.