In January 2008 Microsoft acquired Calista Technologies and those attending one of the last presentations at the annual Microsoft partner event, held in Houston last year, were luck enough to be given a brief glimpse of Calista’s desktop session manager. Since then however Microsoft has been very quiet about its VDI plans.
Few details about its solution, possibly based upon Calista’s Virtual Desktop (CVD) and Hyper-V, are available at today beside the original list of supported hypervisors, VMware and Citrix ones, along with Microsoft Terminal Services platform.
On the paper CVD has some real potential. CVD provides support for 100% of all file and streaming media types available for a modern Windows desktop experience without the need for dedicated hardware or software on the client. Specifically, CVD eliminates the need for media player software and software codecs that increase client management costs, and which impact client interfaces when media codecs are not available for a particular application or client platform.
CVD optimizes the RDP protocol to drastically reduce network bandwidth requirements and improve the user experience in bandwidth-constrained and high-latency environments. For example, CVD’s patent pending, visually lossless compression algorithm achieves data accelerations of as much as 20x supporting a high quality standard business desktop usage, including rich media, at 1Mbit/s per user.
However while in the past Microsoft is implicitly admitting that its Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is not optimised for multimedia streaming but with the up and comming release of Windows 7 and the much improved RDP 7 has Microsoft integrated some of the Calistia’s technologies into RDP. One thing is for sure though Microsoft is going to overlap Citrix ICA more than ever.
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