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Open Virtual Desktop 3.0 as an alternative to VDI

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Article from ADMIN 16/2013

By Thomas Drilling

Anyone in the market for an alternative to commercial virtual desktop infrastructure solutions should take a look at Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop. It's free of charge, open source, and combines Windows and Linux applications on the virtual desktop.

Ulteo was founded by Mandriva inventor Gael Duval in 2007, and its first product was an online version of OpenOffice. People seemed to take a liking to virtualized applications, because just one year later, version 1.0 of Open Virtual Desktop (OVD) [1], which was already capable of providing Linux desktops and applications in the browser, was released. Late last year, Ulteo released OVD version 3.0.3, which is mature enough for admins to consider as an alternative to a full-fledged virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution.

As a "free desktop virtualization solution," the GPL-licensed software lets you deliver Linux and Windows applications or complete desktops from a server over the local network and render them in a Java-enabled browser. From a technology standpoint, OVD is more of a graphical terminal server that manages desktop sessions and delivers them to a variety of endpoints on the network, whereas a genuine VDI solution is based on virtualization technology and allocates virtual machines with an enterprise desktop operating system, generated from a blueprint (golden image), to the clients as required.

Compared with that approach, OVD belongs more in the server-based computing camp – a technology that actually dates back to the IT Stone Age. Ulteo, however, combines the advantages of server-based computing with a web application server and a state-of-the-art web client (available in a HTML5 version in the near future). OVD thus allows any registered user to access hosted desktops – along with the data stored there – from anywhere, or to use specific native applications in the browser. Thus, Ulteo's target is not primarily that of consolidating hardware but of providing an elegant approach to collaboration, for example, by letting multiple users access the same desktop. Ulteo's approach avoids many of the disadvantages of conventional desktop sharing. For

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