ANTenna Blog -- Hardware & Software

KACE Virtual Kontainers -- love the spelling -- is designed to remove application conflicts and make it easier for companies to roll out and update software.

Software deployment is difficult, KACE said, and it often cited as a top pain point by small to midsize companies. The process requires companies to deal with packaging, installation, testing, managing and removal of new applications. Installation may not work on all machines, and so testing has to cover all machines and all possible application conflicts. "What if something as simple as Adobe Reader causes incompatibilities," asked senior product manager Bob Kelly.

Application deployment is difficult and complicated.

But existing solutions like VMware VDI and Microsoft Application Virtualization are "too expensive, too complicated and require too many specialized skills," especially for smaller companies, said Lubos Parobek, KACE's VP of product management. They can actually add complexity, Parobek claims, so they're typically used only in larger organizations. With VDI, for example, apps run on the local computer and use local resources.

But KACE takes a completely different approach by installing the apps into a virtual "kontainer" and sending that out to individual computers. Within Kontainers, the virtualized apps can see to the local system, but not any other apps on that system -- eliminating any possible software conflicts. There's no need to repackage apps, and the entire process can be controlled from a Web-based console. The apps themselves reside on KACE's KBOX systems management appliance, making it easy to roll back or remove them.

The Virtual Kontainer Web Console

The catch is that while Virtual Kontainers start at $3,995 for 100 managed clients, they require the KBOX, which starts at $9,900. A full-fledged system, including a KBOX and Virtual Kontainers as well as patching, scripting, software distribution, and inventory functionality costs about $15,000, Kelly said.

Virtual Kontainers support only Windows machines right now, but KBOX also supports Macintosh and Unix operating systems. Kelly said KACE is looking into supporting Unix systems, but Macintosh installations are much easier and usually don't require this type of solution.

Finally, like any virtualization solution, there's a slight performance hit, which Kelly described as "negligible," although the company has't run metrics on it yet.

Kelly says Virtual Kontainers are appropriate for companies with at least 80-100 nodes, where it becomes too much work for the IT staff to maintain them all manually. The product is expected to ship April 27, 2009.