Microsoft Ups Desktop Virtualisation Game With Fresh Betas

Microsoft has announced two beta products designed to help the firm get a better hold on on the still-nascent desktop virtualisation market.

A brand new product, the User Experience Virtualisation (UE-V), designed to keep virtual desktops the same across employee devices, so their changes remain consistent. So if they make configuration changes to apps on one instance on a device, it won’t change on another instance on a different machine.

Virtual reality

“Regardless if it is a rich desktop or a hosted VDI desktop, a traditional application or a virtual application, UE-V enables a personal, consistent Windows experience across devices, matching each person’s unique work style for increased productivity anytime, anywhere,” said Karri Alexion-Tiernan, Microsoft’s director of product management for desktop virtualisation, in a blog post.

“UE-V integrates with our Microsoft Desktop Virtualisation products and can be deployed with System Center Configuration Manager, as well as third party management tools.”

App-V 5.0 is an update to Microsoft’s virtualised application management tool, which makes virtual apps work more like native apps, the Redmond giant said.

“Most of the time, when IT sends an App-V application to a user’s device, the device stores a copy of the application for use offline. This lets the user stay productive while disconnected,” Alexion-Tiernan added.

“Think for a moment about VDI, in this scenario there is no disconnected use – the servers providing VDI to users are in the data centre. For this use-case, App-V 5.0 Beta lets IT simply choose to turn off local application storage, dramatically reducing disk requirements for VDI while leaving the application provisioning and update process unchanged.”

The update also comes with a fresh web-based management interface based on Silverlight, alongside support for Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Both UE-V and App-V 5.0 betas are available for download today.

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