Sun announced the availability of Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Software 3, which provides new enhancements and features to help companies maximize their IT infrastructure utilization and improve manageability of desktop deployments.
After Sun VDI Software 2.0, launched in March 2008, the company makes available its Sun VDI Software 3, that offers VDI storage economics, built-in virtualization capabilities, and support for a wide variety of virtual desktop operating systems. The open architecture of Sun VDI Software 3 gives users access to a broader choice of client devices and virtualization hosts – increasing flexibility, management efficiency and data security. Sun VDI Software 3 is available for purchase immediately and a free trial of the software can be downloaded.
Sun VDI Software 3 represents a seamless solution, leveraging core open source technologies including Sun’s Open Storage, OpenSolaris, VirtualBox and MySQL. With Sun VDI Software 3, customers can deploy a number of virtual desktop operating systems, including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2000, OpenSolaris and Ubuntu, and access these operating systems from a variety of client devices – such as traditional PCs or Macs, energy-efficient Sun Ray thin clients, or thin clients from other vendors. In addition, to host virtual desktop environments, IT architects can opt to use the improved integration with VMware Infrastructure, leverage Sun built-in virtualization, or use a mixture of the two.
The management capabilities of Sun VDI Software 3 result in lower equipment costs, less energy consumption, reduced system cooling requirements, simplified system administration and reduced e-waste. Since desktops are centrally hosted, only the display is sent to the client device; critical data never leaves the corporate network and can be managed and backed up by IT. Built-in Sun Ray technology support takes advantage of the inherent security features of Sun Ray thin clients, which contain no resident operating system or applications – making them virtually immune to client-side viruses.
The integration with Solaris ZFS and Open Storage enables superior data integrity for business continuity and exceptional data throughput in an economical storage footprint with simplified management design. The expanded VMware support enables customers to scale larger deployments of Sun VDI Software paired with VMware Infrastructure. The Active Directory support permits customers to easily assign virtual desktops to users in Active Directory. The built-in support for Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) allows customers to connect directly to a Sun VDI Software 3 server from nearly any RDP-enabled device, without installing any software on the client. The simplified installation provides a single installer for the core components to reduce complexity.
Sun VDI Software 3 is available and offers flexible subscription-based pricing as low as $40 per user/per year, as a discounted price off the U.S. list price for pre-pay and multi-year purchases.