Citrix is supposed to trot out XenDesktop – its virtual Windows desktop trick – any minute now and when it does the UK firm AppSense is supposed to be there to make the Xen widgetry useful.

See, the way it works every time you restart XenDesktop you start with a clean slate, according to AppSense VP of corporate and product strategy Martin Ingram. You’ll lose your personalized settings and corporate policies but for the intervention of AppSense Environment Manager, used before with other Citrix products and extended to support the XenDesktop Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

It separates the so-called personality from the virtual desktop – essentially abstracting the user’s policy and preference settings from the operating system and applications – and applies them on-demand as each fresh desktop is provisioned, AppSense says.

It’s server-based and requires an agent on the desktop to make the desktop portable and is supposed to lower management and storage costs. It’s also supposed to simplify the delivery and maintenance of the virtual environment by removing the need to treat each environment as a unique entity.

Administrators can tailor both policy and personalization under different startup, shutdown, login and logoff scenarios. Virtual images can be pooled and on-demand provisioned desktops can be used in a heterogeneous environment.

The widgetry is meant to be used in large deployments and a 500-user package runs $16,000. Support options are priced separately.