Unidesk Corporation, provider of layering software for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments yesterday released version 3.0 of Unidesk. The Unidesk layering solution provides a way to divide a disk image into logical parts which can be managed individually, which reduces the amount of storage necessary. These logical parts can be stacked for each virtual desktop so that the OS, Applications and User settings are presented to the virtual desktop in a transparant way.
Unidesk now supports running Microsoft RDS on top of Hyper-V, running Citrix XenDesktop either on VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V and running VMware Horizon View running on top of VMware vSphere. With version 3.0 Unidesk introduces support for the Hyper-V hypervisor from Microsoft. Unidesk already supported the vSphere platform from VMware and provides no information whether version 3.0 also includes updates for this platform as well.
Version 3.0 (appearantly Hyper-V only) provides the following new capabilities:
- Support for provisioning applications using a read-only virtual disk (VHDs)
- Windows OS Layering, allowing for one golden image to serve as a basis for many VMs
- Desktop Provisioning, to create persistent and non-persistent virtual desktops.
- Personalization layers, writable virtual disks which capture user settings, data, plug-ins and user-installed applications
- Storage optimization by allowing sharing of virtual disks by multiple VMs
- Integration with Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS)
- Integration with Citrix XenDesktop running on top of Hyper-V