virtualization.info

In January 2007 Symantec started its slow entrance in the virtualization market acquiring Altiris, a company mostly known for its enterprise management products than for its brand new application virtualization product SVS (Software Virtualization Solution).

After the acquisition Symantec released just a minor update of SVS (that became the acronym of Symantec Virtualization Solution), still using the Altiris brand, in June 2007 and then nothing else.

For a long time the security giant strategy for the application virtualization market has been totally obscure, until March 2008 when a dedicated Endpoint Virtualization Business Unit was created. Then Symantec went silent again.

Now, maybe, the company is ready to move forward and tell the world its plan to compete with Microsoft, Citrix, VMware, Novell and the plethora of startups that populate this market segment.

On what it seems to be the official blog of the former Altiris SVS business unit, somebody announced the upcoming beta program for Symantec Workspace Virtualization (SWV), the new name for SVS.
It’s worth to not that, along with the name, also the product versioning has a significant refresh, jumping from 2.1 to 6.1.

The features that will be introduced in this new version are remarkable anyway:

• Layers dependency (users can define chain of layers that are activated as soon as the main layer is)
• Application isolation (this point requires further clarifications as the application virtualization layers are supposed to be already isolated)
• Layers patching (users can patch layers without replacing them through incremental deployments of new bits)
• Support for multi-users (which means support for Microsoft Terminal Services)

No words on when SWV 6.1 will be available.

Labels: Symantec