RoudyBob.NET

On Monday, December 4th, Sentillion vBusiness announced the availability of vThere v2.0. I did a pretty extensive overview of the vThere solution and an interview with their leadership team awhile back. The Sentillion team and their PR firm have been very proactive in dealing with me and offered me a chance to speak again with Paul Roscoe (President) and Dave Fusari (CTO) about the new release. Here’s a copy of the PPT presentation they provided me as part of the briefing.

Overall, little has changed for vThere in terms of the general strategy and target for the product. It’s still aimed as a secure remote access solution for companies who have either field offices, mobile users or home-based employees. The idea is that these users can access corporate resources through a tightly controlled and standardized virtual machine “image” consisting of an OS (Windows XP) and the corporate-standard applications that are required. The vThere value proposition is in the toolset they have built around industry-standard virtualization to build, deploy and manage these virtual machine images easily. Version 2 moves forward with that vision and incorporates some interesting additions and changes.

The most significant change is the decision to adopt the Parallels Desktop software as the standard virtualization environment for vThere images. Previously, Sentillion had used VMware Player for this purpose. Paul was genuinely excited about the change, citing some good synergies between the respective companies and instant access to a broad range of host operating system environments – Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It seems to me to be a smart move for them as both are small companies which can move quickly whereas working with VMware was probably very difficult for the Sentillion team. WIth the rate at which VMware has grown, it probably became harder and harder to get significant – especially considering VMware’s new VDI initiatives. (This didn’t come from Paul or Dave – simply my own reasoning and analysis of the decision.)

Next, they’ve added some pretty interesting “wrapper” technology to the vThere virtual machine image – a sort of rights management for virtual machines. This allows the administrator to specify expiration dates for virtual machines, for example – preventing users from accessing corporate resources after a certain date or time period. This provides some more granular control over how vThere images are used. With the swtich to Parallels also comes some simplification in how end users install and configure their virtual machine images. Instead of requiring the end user to have the virtualization technology installed prior to activating an image, activating an image can automagically install and configure the parallels software required to run the virtual machines.

The remainder of v2’s changes have to deal mostly with the administration and distribution of virtual machines. Though it has always been part of the overall solution strategy, with the introduction of vThere v2.0, Sentillion is making the vThere.NET image distribution service and website available to customers. This is the web-based distribution center where administrators place images for end users to download and install based on corporate policy. I am unable to even find a landing page, though, for the vThere.NET service on the vThere site at this point so I talk much more than that about it. The newly introduced service will use Amazon’s S3 Web Services as the storage and bandwidth distribution service for serving out these large images. Though image size is reportedly addressed with the new release as well. Dave Fusari indicated they were seeing between 30% and 40% compression in image sizes with the new algorithms they’re using in v2.0.

It’s interesting to see the team at vThere continue to evolve their solution. I am working on scheduling a demonstration or evaluation of the software to try it first-hand and will report my findings.

Technorati Tags: vThere, Virtualization