This week Microsoft opened up a public beta of Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) 2.0.
The MED-V technology comes from Microsoft’s acquisition of Kidaro back in March 2008. What seemed to grab Microsoft’s attention was Kidaro’s Managed Workspace technology — a platform wrapper around a transparent virtual machine layer that provided enterprise-class management and deployment for desktop virtualization with added security, policies, and encryption. It competed with the likes of VMware ACE, MokaFive, and RingCube.
Since the acquisition, Microsoft hasn’t really set the world on fire with its version of Kidaro’s software. The Kidaro product was quickly rebranded a few months after the acquisition, but Microsoft took an entire year to release a 1.0 version of the software. MED-V 1.0 SP1 was released earlier this year and was quickly followed by a private beta of MED-V 2.0 this past summer.
MED-V 2.0 is one of a number of tools that Microsoft offers to its Software Assurance customers. It is delivered as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), so if you are searching for how to purchase the software separately, stop. It isn’t offered as a stand-alone product.
So what exactly is MED-V? It’s an enterprise management solution that uses Microsoft Virtual PC as a platform in order to provide a localized strategy for desktop virtualization, but with centralized management. It helps to create, deploy, manage, monitor, and control Virtual PC virtual machines in a corporate environment.
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