OK, MED-V is cool! Sadly, cool though it is, it’s not something we’ll use3 at BM, but in my previous lives doing large organisation IT, MED-V would have been a killer.
In a nutshell, it is this: create a Virtual PC image with your legacy OS and legacy App. Deploy that VPC to your users desktop so they can run your legacy app but let them run the app without needing to start the VPC and use two desktops.
That’s right - MED-V apps appear in the host OS Start Menu and fire up windows which, although using the appearance of the guest OS, are hosted straight on the desktop. Not only that, but they get task bar entries, and even tray icons!
It’s really well thought out - admins create the VPCs, publish them into a server infrastructure and publish the images and apps to users. The system takes care of versioning for the images and pushes them out to users which reduces the amount of data transferred.
You can allow roaming users to work remotely as well, but do clever things like setting a time limit, after which the virtual apps won’t work because the user needs to connect to the main system to get updates to the guest OS.
It’s great. It’s also not out yet. Beta 1 is expected Q1 2009, although they are looking for early access users. Release is projected for H1 2009. If you’re a big organisation and migration to Vista is a pain, MED-V may be for you, although it’s only available to SA customers, as far as I can tell.
The snags (there are always some, right?): Host OS is Vista Sp1 or XP SP2/3 32-bit only. Guest OS is Windows XP or Windows 2000 only.
It was a great session, and you definitely want to find out more about this.