Symantec Corp. plans to announce today Symantec Endpoint Virtualization Suite, intended to improve end-user productivity and lower the cost of managing endpoint devices. The suite enables customers to provision anything from traditional endpoints to full virtual endpoint workspaces based on standards independent of hypervisors, operating systems, and hardware platforms. The solution provides support across traditional endpoint and emerging end-user computing environments such as server-based computing, virtual hosted desktops and client-side hypervisors.
The suite integrates endpoint virtualization technologies from Symantec's recent acquisitions of AppStream and nSuite, and includes feature enhancements to other products in the portfolio. The suite includes Symantec Workspace Streaming, Symantec Workspace Virtualization, Symantec Workspace Corporate and Symantec Workspace Remote. Symantec Workspace Profiles, scheduled for availability in April, will add dynamic profile management to the solution.
Symantec Workspace Streaming provides on-demand application streaming, optimizing software delivery and license management and thus reducing infrastructure costs. It allows customers to use their industry standard MSI (Windows Installer) packages without repackaging, maintaining the MSI logic through deployment. Advanced streaming functionality allows an MSI file to be streamed directly to a virtual layer or to the base without virtualizing. This new addition extends the functionality of MSI streaming. In addition, flexible offline provisioning now allows hardware type and context to be detected, allowing customers to define unique mobile/standards and apply profiles appropriately.
In support of license management, with Workspace Streaming, the license isn't provisioned until someone uses it, Brad Rowland, director of marketing for Endpoint Virtualization for Symantec, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Additionally, if an organization has a ULA (user license agreement) that allows licenses to be reharvested after a specified period of time (such as 30 days), "our streaming mechanism is very smart," Rowland notes. "It knows that this user uses this license and this product," and if that goes unused for 30 days, then it will reharvest that, and put it back into a pool. Moreover, it is "very smart" about how a license is provisioned, so if an end-user license agreement is for a certain user that can be specified during the configuration process and "it doesn't matter from that point forward whether the user accesses that application from their machine at home, whether they access that from their desktop or laptop; it will only consume one license because it's the same user."
Another product in the suite, Symantec Workspace Virtualization (formerly Altiris Software Virtualization Solution), increases application stability and interoperability, regardless of how or where applications are delivered. Symantec Workspace Virtualization eliminates application conflict, reducing the cost of time and resource use for interoperability testing and accelerating application rollouts. Additionally, Symantec Workspace Corporate and Symantec Workspace Remote offer portable user workspace management, dynamically allocating traditional and virtual computing resources from one or many vendors to a user or endpoint, regardless of device. Symantec Workspace Corporate and Workspace Remote combine local and remote applications into a single workspace that maintains context as the user moves from machine to machine, or various workspace types, with local printing management and single sign-on.
Finally, Symantec Workspace Profiles is planned to offer mobile personality capabilities that record configuration changes to a central repository. Changes are designed to be applied contextually to desktops, workspaces and applications to provide a consistent, portable user experience across multiple environment types. For more information, go here.