VDIworks announced it has integrated its solution with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007, which provides management of physical and virtual deployments throughout the data center, desktops and devices. With a new VDIworks plug-in, called VDIvision for System Center, joint Microsoft/VDIworks customers can use System Center to manage a variety of VDIworks-driven features, including a highly configurable and scalable connection broker, leveraging the power of desktop virtualization to reduce costs and improve security, among other benefits. On the heels of Microsoft's release of Hyper-V, VDIworks is a virtual desktop management vendor to integrate with Hyper-V and the System Center management offerings.

VDIworks delivers a comprehensive, flexible software management platforms for creating, deploying and managing virtual desktop infrastructure. Microsoft Hyper-V customers can now rely on VDIworks technology that is built on five generations of proven centralized computing solutions. In addition, companies looking to add Microsoft-driven virtualization while maintaining their deployments powered by other hypervisors can use VDIworks software to manage any virtual desktop environment.

"Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V delivers the next-generation of hypervisor-based server virtualization technology and when coupled with the System Center enterprise offerings, customers have the solutions they need to deploy and manage a server virtualization infrastructure," said Dai Vu, director of virtualization products and solutions at Microsoft. "By integrating VDIworks with Hyper-V and System Center, customers have available a broadened set of functionality for extending the management of end-to-end virtual desktops through a single user interface."

VDIworks integration with Microsoft's System Center results from close cooperation among VDIworks and Microsoft developers. VDIworks utilized APIs from Microsoft to ensure seamless functionality among both products.

"We are pleased to have worked with Microsoft to integrate our VDI management platform with System Center," said Rick Hoffman, president and CEO of VDIworks. "This now provides customers a management platform for reducing the complexity of managing a virtual desktop environment leveraging Hyper-V."

With VDIworks integration, System Center users will now be able to:

• Discover their entire virtual desktop environments, including thin clients, multiple hypervisors, hosts and other systems from within System Center.
• Generate comprehensive virtual desktop usage, inventory and health reports using VDIworks reporting functionality.
• Utilize connection broker functions, including connecting thin clients to virtual machines, users to virtual machines, thin clients to physical hosts and users to physical hosts. Support for 1:1 connections and shared connections is available.
• Use VDIworks' configurable load balancing, which allows the best virtual machine to be allocated to the end-user based on whether the user's application load is memory-bound, CPU-bound or consumes other resource types.
• Perform comprehensive end-to-end, virtual and physical management of all virtual desktop resources using VDIworks support for Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Intel® vPro and soon, the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI).
• Provide fine-grained control to system administrators, help desk administrators and other IT staff involved with virtual desktop management using VDIworks' rights delegation functionality and integration with Microsoft's Active Directory.