Quest has signed a silent OEM agreement with Liquidware Labs, under that agreements Quest now provides the Liquidware Labs Stratusphere tool rebranded as Quest VDI assessment, for free to everyone to use for up to 45 days on a unlimited number of desktops, Brian Madden reports. If users want to continue to use the product afterwards Quest should be contacted, it’s not clear if Quest is charging users for that though. Its interesting to note that the founder of Liquidware Labs, David Bieneman also is the founder of VizionCore, which was acquired by Quest in January 2008.
Stratusphere is a VDI assessment tool, provided as a Virtual Appliance which can run inside VMware vSphere or Citrix XenServer and which assesses your current environment, providing information which can help to decide which users, pc’s, applications and servers are ready for Citrix XenDesktop, VMware View and/or Windows 7. And now apparently also Quest vWorkSpace.
This agreement is quite interesting since Stratusphere is also used by the VMware Professional Services Organization (PSO) used for assessments, when this announcement was made virtualization.info even speculated that VMware might acquire Liquidware Labs in the future. Also the Dell Services Team uses Stratusphere for assessment as well.
With this agreement, Liquidware labs now gaines a remarkable importance in the VDI assessment market, since the tool is used by large players in the field.
Update: Michel Roth, who is Principal Product Architect at Quest responded to our article stating a couple of things. First, Quest doesn’t OEM the Stratusphere tooling, but it licensed the source code of the product from Liquidware Labs. With this source code licensed, Quest modified the product so that it also assesses Terminal Server . Michel also clarified, that the 45 day license can be extended for free, just by sending an email to a Quest representative.