VMware ACE 2.0 accoladed by the Industry

The Register reports about the Desktop assault with the launch of VMware's ACE product. Another great way to transform a product into something suddenly so cool. ACE 1.x has been cool as well. But like I always say, timing is everything. Today ACE 2.0 will suddenly propel the desktop revolution. A lot of vendors who are on the "Server Virtualization Track" should take a deep look at VMware.

VMware has , with the release of ACE 2.0, taken a deep move to the "Server to Desktop Virtualization Track". Obviously we will do the ACE work and blog about it from time to time of its capabilities. In fact , I will "ACE Master" the developer box that I created on my ESX, converted it using VMware Converter to a VMware Server image and work on securing the box with the expriy dates. It is very effective when working with contract developers (like I had some days back for a couple of weeks). That way you can propogate the contractual agreements on the development ACE image as well.

And I have loads of scenarios I can think of that you can do when you take a approach to the "Virtual Appliance Provisioning" as compared to the "Software Provisioning" that we do currently with softwares like LanDESK, Altiris etc. Think of a typical Virtual Apppliance Architecture in your enterprise.

Anyways enough of my stories, its about what El Reg is reporting:

Along with these controls, VMware has added support for a wider set of Linux distributions. The likes of Mandriva and Ubuntu have joined SuSE and Red Hat. The beta includes support for Microsoft's new Vista operating system as well, along with XP support. Customers can use 32-bit or 64-bit OSes and manage images up to 8GB in size.

To keep track of all the virtual machines, VMware rolled out ACE Management Server. This does what you might expect by letting administrators monitor and control all of their ACE images and do things such as canceling an ACE image from the server console.

"In the past, we had a manager, but it wasn't a fully independent component," said Jerry Chen, a product director at VMware. "The new software is more fully-featured and can track all of a customer's virtual machines – both active and inactive."

In addition to the previous tools, VMware has started shipping something it calls Pocket ACE, which is simply the ability to place desktop images on a USB drive or other portable storage device and then have the software load automatically on a machine.

VMware claims thousands of ACE customers, including a mix of corporate and education clients.

Read the rest here.

More about ACE here.