Today, Sun will release the latest VDI software (in early access). You can pull it from here. I have been working with the software for the past week and have to say that 'I like it'. Instead of building a new VDI platform to compete with itself and others - the folks in engineering took a new approach. There is a VDI tier that you plug in your virtualization platform. Yes, the same VDI kit will work with VMware, as well as xVM VirtualBox. New desktop providers can be created to plug in to the same framework.
Enough on the marketing - what I found intriguing about the way the product comes together is how everything is just integrated. When delivering VDI services there are a number of things you need to consider for the enterprise - among the top items are: where is the back-end storage for the VM's, how will you identify the user and provision the VM on their behalf, which VDI product should you use, what if we need to change mid-stream, what OS experience does the user need, can I change that experience on a per user basis.... Yes, these are leading questions but they are ones that have been easily addressed with VDI3 EA2. Provisioning for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Solaris, Any flavor of Linux .... in fact any user environment that will run in xVM VirtualBox is fair game. Support for ActiveDirectory as the identity source (or native LDAP) works out of the box with a click of the mouse. Placing your user environments in NAT'ed environments works ....
In my small lab environment I stood up a V20z as my VDI broker (delivering user environments to any platform that a user connected from - Sun Ray or traditional PC). I built up a x4500 as my storage server running OpenSolaris - the user interface to VDI3 EA2 - connected directly via iSCSI. I then placed my previously used x4600 in as a Desktop Provider running xVM VirtualBox. The result....
In about 4 hours of real work time - I had the 'system' delivering cloned images to named users. Yes, I connected to the office LDAP server and connected users to VM's with just a button click. I started the cloning using the import desktop feature of the system. I grabbed a VDI file from my laptop and used it as the template for all the work - leveraging absolutely everything I had already done.
There is still a little work to be done - but download the software and see where virtualization of the desktop is headed. Screen shots and diagrams to follow.