Kidaro

MoMo left a comment on my post about North Carolina University going to VDI for student labs to the effect that Kidaro (now owned by Microsoft) was a much better solution than VMWare's ACE.

As MoMo's profile was private I couldn't follow up on the reasons why.

All these virtual application delivery solutions work like Metropipe's original Personal Virtual Privacy machine - boot an emulator, eg qemu, boot an operating system, eg damn small linux, start the desktop and run the applications. And of course this can be distributes on CD or over the web as a download.

Now the idea of distributing applications like this is quite clever. For a start you could build a virtual company with one distribution server, and a server to check completed work back into, which could be as simple as Sakai, and providing anyone has a suitable desktop or laptop, no support infrastructure in terms of application distribution servers etc. Coupled with something like Groove it could be a very powerful way of working.

All true. But you can build the solution in other ways. Even from the ground up using bits an pieces of open source code. And nothing I've read suggests that there is anything remarkable in Kidaro that isn't in ACE.

So, if I'm wrong, could someone explain why ?