Qumranet Solid ICE

I've been chatting with several people, including John-Marc Clark, VP of Marketing of Qumranet about KVM, the open source kernel based virtual machine project that is now part of the Linux kernel, and the company's new product Solid ICE™. Solid ICE, that seems one part access virtualization, one part application virtualization and one part virtual processing software. Now the the company has come out of stealth mode, I can share a bit of what I've learned with you.

Here's what the company would say about Solid ICE:

Solid ICE is the only fully integrated desktop virtualization solution in the market today built specifically for virtualizing desktop environments, and therefore, provides all the benefits of centralized computing with the interactivity and rich user experience of desktop computing. With Solid ICE™, the user’s desktop runs in a KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) virtual machine on a server in the data center, and the user connects to it using a thin client (or a repurposed PC) via SPICE™ (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing

Environments), Qumranet’s connection protocol. SPICE is optimized for virtual desktop environments, and provides users with a superior interactive experience.

Product Highlights

• Virtual Desktop Server - A component that makes it possible for Windows XP, Windows 2000 or Linux virtual desktops to be hosted on top of a Linux server environment, each in their own virtual machine. This component also offers the capability to optimize resource utilization allowing staff members to see a highly responsive, highly manageable environment.
• Virtual Desktop Controller - A component that controls and manages virtual desktops. This component creates virtual desktops, provisions them with the appropriate software, and manages the connections to physical client systems. It provides the advanced capabilities of supporting a high availability/failover service so no single server outage would make virtual desktops unavailable.
• Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE™) - a simple protocoal that makes it possible to create a highly responsive environment.

Snapshot Analysis

Solid ICE is a new take on virtual access that also includes features normally found in application virtualization and virtual processing software. It appears to provided a number of features that would offer benefits to an organization's IT staff including reducing the time (and expense) of setting up users' desktops and then keeping them up to date, backing them up and still maintaining tight control of who can access what. It also gives users the ability to link to a number of virtual desktops from the same client device from wherever they are.Organizations needing this combination of capabilities might like this mix of capabilities.

How would you use this tool in your environment?