Lakeside Simplifies VMware View Desktop Virtualization

To smooth and speed the road to desktop virtualization deployments, Lakeside Software has announced a partnership with VMware making VMP (Virtual Machine Planning), the Virtual Machine planning and assessment portions of Lakeside's SysTrack tool suite, available at little-to-no-cost to VMware partners for use in assessing desktop virtualization based on VMware View.

Founded in 1997, Lakeside Software provides tools for monitoring and managing Windows environments. SysTrack is a real-time system monitoring software suite for physical, virtual and mixed Windows environments.

According to Carrie Reynolds, director, channel sales, Lakeside Software, the new agreement gives VMware Technical Services Professionals (VTSPs) easier and significantly less expensive access to SysTrack's assessment, design and planning tools to support and accelerate desktop virtualization projects based on VMware View and VMware ThinApp.

VTSPs include VMware's Professional Services Organization (PSO), and anyone certified by VMware to work with VMware View, like VMware channel partners.

SysTrack consists of an agent program installed on Windows systems or VMs, monitoring user and application performance, and a management console that aggregates and analyses the data.

According to Mike Schumacher, chief technical officer at Lakeside, "SysTrack provides a comprehensive, real-world view of the activity taking place across an organization's desktop computing environment. SysTrack provides accurate assessment information to plan and implement a successful virtual desktop platform, and delivers it in a packaged report format that provides easy-to-understand answers to the various stakeholders involved in the process."

"SysTrack helps you understand which users and applications would be a good fit for desktop virtualization, by tracking the applications and user workload assigned to the system, to ensure you can prepare and identify for the capacity needed, for provisioning plans," says Reynolds. "We help companies do planning faster, by identifying the easy use cases, and putting together a comprehensive plan which provides a roadmap from a physical to a virtual environment."

SysTrak also helps identify how much storage will be needed, and other concerns, according to Reynolds. "This helps remove the perceived risk of moving to VDI by providing a comprehensive plan specific to your work and users while keeping your virtualization goals in mind."

In terms of desktop virtualization environment sizes, "We usually look for companies with 500 seats and up, but there's no intrinsic lower or upper size limit," said Reynolds.

According to Donn Bullock, vice president of sales virtualization & cloud computing, Mainline Information Systems, "In the hands of our virtualization experts, the SysTrack toolset from Lakeside empowers our customers with unprecedented decision-making details, enabling better up-front planning with critical post-deployment oversight, ultimately leading to a more successful VDI implementation."

Lakeside also sells tools for use post-deployment, according to Reynolds, "to monitor and quantify the health of the user experience -- a dashboard to confirm that a new environment is working as well as the previous one, and if not, why, so that can be fixed."

SysTrack can also be used to assess performance requirements for other Windows deployments, such as other desktop virtualization environments, thin clients, Windows 7 migration, although for these purposes, companies will have to procure SysTrack through normal channels and at the full price.