Tranxition: Virtualizing your desktop personality

After a rousing game of format wars, I finally was able to read launch materials describing AdaptivePersona™, a new product from Tranxition. It appears that this company is offering another entry into the market for virtualized desktop environments. They're trying to flog the catch phrase "user virtualization" to distinguish their entry from all of the others in this market. The question that remains to be answered is "can Tranxition out maneuver rivals such as Citrix, Microsoft, Virtual Computer, VMware, Wanova and the like?"

Here's what Tranxition has to say about AdaptivePersona

A New User Virtualization Approach

Reduce desktop management complexity and operating cost by up to 40% by virtualizing the user experience and desktop personality with Tranxition’s AdaptivePersona™. This innovative user virtualization solution frees IT staff to manage desktops in an efficient, centralized way without sacrificing the rich personalization users expect.

Manage User Environments Separately to Cut Costs from 25% to 40%

The AdaptivePersona solution is based on an innovative "personality hypervisor" and patented SmartShadow™ technology to intelligently abstract each end user’s desktop customizations and free IT to focus on, and manage, the OS and applications as a commodity.

Desktop customizations that can be abstracted include a user’s personalized:

• Application settings
• OS settings
• Files
• Metadata
• Network configurations
• Data outside of Windows profiles

By reducing the overhead of managing customized end-user environments, IT staff can focus on optimizing the infrastructure while giving users greater access and mobility within traditional and virtual environments so users aren’t tied to a single desktop or virtual image. Companies can also reduce support calls to IT by up to 30% and increase the rate of new technology adoption.

Snapshot analysis

There are several types of virtualization technology that are being focused on addressing the issues facing users of desktop systems, laptops and mobile computing devices. Tranxition is combining some sophisticated management technology, replication technology and several forms of virtualization technology in their offering.  They're not the first and it is yet to be proven that their approach will win out over earlier movers in this market.

The earliest form of virtualization applied to encapsulating and delivering access to desktop applications was access virtualization. X-Windows; Citrix's presentation server, now called "XenDesktop"; and Microsoft's Terminal services are typical examples of this form of virtualization.  This form is often used for transactional applications, but have some issues when delivering highly graphical or media based workloads.  These issues, however, have been the topic of a great deal of work and are receding into the background. One issue that remains is that when a person goes off the net, the applications delivered this way are no longer available.

Later applications were encapsulated and delivered to desktop systems using applicaiton virtualization. AppZero, Citrix XenApp, InstallFree and Microsoft Application Virtualiation (formally Softricity Softgrid) are all examples of this approach.

The most recent technology applied to this environment was virtual machine technology. In this last case, an entire desktop environment, including operating system, data management layer, applications and the like were encapsulated into a virtual desktop. At first this approach centered on copying virtual machine files onto a system along with some form of hypervisor. While being able to run multiple desktops had a number of benefits, managing this type of environment can be quite a chore.

• After all each person wants to control their own settings for operating environments, applications and the like while IT administrators would perfer to enforce a singe set of options to reduce their workoad.
• Each person wants to maintain their own approach to managing files and directories while IT administrators would prefer to enforce a single approach that makes it easy to back up and recover files.
• Each person may want to add special tools and applications to simplify the tasks they face every day while the IT administrators want to simplify management, installation and updating of the environments by limiting application choice.

Suppliers, such as Tranxition, Wanova and Virtual Computer among others, have stepped in to create management environments that provide individuals with the choice that they require while also making it easy for administrators to create, provision, distribute and manage desktop environments.

Tranxition is somewhat late to the party. That being said, they have some interesting thoughts on how this should be done. Once again, it appears that the approach taken by Virtual Computer has a finer level of control granularity. Tranxition appears to have a better delivery mechanism.