VMware Pocket Ace alternative?

Question

I'm looking into using VMWares Pocket Ace so that users can work from home/abroad without needing to loan out a laptop. This way I could just have a few Flash Drives that I could loan out when necessary and the user will be able to take it home and plug it into there home pc and use a similar desktop environment.

Are there any open source alternatives to accomplish the same thing? What are the advantages to ACE. I know that you can just copy all the VMware files over to a usb flash drive and run the VM from any machine that has VMplayer. It seems to just lack some security features that comes with ACE, but everything else seems to work just fine. Am I missing something here?

Answer 1

Hi ACE is a simple yet powerful solution for distributing an office desktop to home users. As you mention there isn't much difference between VMware Player and ACE except for the security layer included in ACE.

The main thing in ACE is the possibility to lock down the host OS when running ACE giving a very secure environment.

The other feature is the Management Server that actually gives you control of the desktops you have distributed. That actually brings up a question - how will you manage that your employees wont distribute the VM to other users and that their access to the VM can be revoked if they stop working for your company.

That's exactly what you need the ACE / Management Server for. With the Management Server you can set who is allowed to use the VM, for how long and how often it should "phone home" for updated security policies. Without it you give away your company OS and applications including licenses without knowing where they will end up.

See more here: http://www.vmware.com/products/ace/

Regards

Michael Monberg - System Engineer - VMware