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Unidesk (Discontinued)

Score5.7 out of 10

13 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Unidesk (Discontinued)?

Unidesk was a virtual desktop technology from the Massachusetts company of the same name, and acquired by Citrix. It has reached End of Life (EOL).

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Reviews

What users are saying about Unidesk (Discontinued).
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Why UniDesk

Sheranga Jayasinghe PMPView profile
Director IT in Information Technology at Sunrise Health Region (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Small Company and great support
  • The product is simple to use, extremely user friendly
  • Does what it says, truly a great tool for application virtualization.

Cons

  • Ability to launch an application with no underline OS (Just like XenApp)

Return on Investment

  • Quick and Easy deployment
  • Managment and maintenance handled by help desk saving resources .(i.e. Senior Analyst)

Unidesk - Simplify your VDI

Incentivized
Rory Monaghan
CTO, Americas in Information Technology at Algiz Technology Limited (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Delivers the majority of applications without issue
  • Unified console for managing all aspects of Virtual Desktop management
  • User layer on a persistent desktop provide an easy profile solution
  • Layers provides the ability to reduce down to 1 Gold Image
  • No more interacting with Hyper-V, RDS or vCenter
  • Speeds up application turn around time

Cons

  • I would love if the User Layer persisted on non-persistent desktops
  • A better experience for the actual assigning of applications and desktops (improvements to the console)
  • Partner with a vendor that provides a legacy browser solution

Return on Investment

  • Image management and updating is now much quicker, time saved
  • Application 'packaging' is required a lot less, which saves a lot of money
  • Unidesks customer service is the best that I have worked with. PERIOD!

Unidesk is a win for persistent virtual desktop deployment.

Incentivized
Jared Hahn
Network Technician in Information Technology at RLI Insurance Company (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Increased efficiency of existing/new SAN infrastructure.
  • Prompt and responsive support.
  • Ease of deployment.
  • Efficiencies in workflow transparent to the end-user.

Cons

  • Disaster recovery options for the Unidesk solution are not easily accessible or require personalized attention from support.
  • Issues when creating software layers do not always have a obvious fix. Make sure to look for and follow Unidesk's published "recipes."
  • The software/OS layering introduced by Unidesk is not "sanctioned" behavior by Microsoft, and thus you're at the mercy of Unidesk's ability to keep up with widespread changes to operating systems.

Return on Investment

  • Storage density with Unidesk (via the use of OS/application layering) is 60-70% improved over standard persistent one-to-one virtual desktops.
  • Unidesk virtual machines can be deployed in under 10 minutes by a lower tier of technician without the need to "touch" the vCenter hypervisor.
  • Reliable performance across Unidesk virtual workstations. Added desktops/layers does not adversely effect performance nearly as bad as older persistent desktops.

UniDesk-Top player for me in desktop layer technology.

Incentivized
Phyrun Heng
System Engineer in Information Technology at Santa Clara County Office of Education (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Creating application layers is easy to do. It's just a matter of installing the applications as you would normally do on a computer.
  • Unidesk's technology isn't sandbox like VMware's ThinApp technology so it works much better and is more compatible with other software.
  • The admin console and technology in general is easy to learn for the administrator while it's transparent to the end users.

Cons

  • Layering technologies still presents challenges in general. There are certain applications which are stubborn and do not work as intended so Unidesk keeps a library of "recipes" for many applications where it outlines specific ways or methods to install the applications so that it will work smoothly once it's assigned.
  • There are limits to the amount of layers that can assigned and the more layers you have, the more complex and more chances of the various layers stepping on each other toes. It may also slow the virtual machines but it's not that noticeable.
  • An application layer is tied to the OS that it's built from. So if you have two master OS images, you'll need to create separate app layers, one for each master OS, contrary to their claim.

Return on Investment

  • We've managed to cut down on maintenance costs, administrative time, and improve the user's experience.

Unidesk Virtual Desktop Management Product Review

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • Takes the complexity out of the virtual desktop development process.
  • Provides responsive, quality product technical support.
  • Stays current with competitors in terms of features and standards.

Cons

  • More hands-on support while bringing Unidesk into a new environment would be useful.
  • More formalized training for those new to the product (I actually believe Unidesk has already developed something to address this).

Return on Investment

  • It is helping to reduce our desktop hardware footprint and extend the lifespan of existing desktop hardware.
  • It has made it easy to scale our persistent virtual desktop environment with minimal time and effort.
  • As with any new service, it does require the allocation of resources that were not required previously, but that is true of any VDI implementation.

Other Software Used

VMware Horizon View