Using Mirage, our customer upgraded target desktops to a new multi gigabyte “golden” base image — over the WAN, while preserving user personalization — in less than one hour. After completing the process, the customer said, “Amazing. This usually takes 2 days, and the end-user doesn’t have access to their PC during that time.”

A different customer loaded a remote user’s CVD from a laptop to a Virtual Machine (VM) running in the data center in order to troubleshoot a problem locally. Within two hours, the customer was able to fix the user’s issue and re-assign the corrected CVD to the end user’s laptop. After resolving the issue, the customer commented, “This process usually requires that we send someone onsite, and it can take days to resolve a problem like this for a remote user. Mirage is going to save us a ton of time and money by centralizing many of our support processes.”

Another customer (yep – we have a lot of beta sites) had a desktop corrupted beyond repair; the system was non-responsive, and Office applications were not functioning. Normally, the only (very painful!) way to recover from such state would have been to re-image the desktop with a clean corporate image, then have the user re-install all of her user-installed applications, re-configure her settings, and backup and restore all of her files before and after the re-imaging, respectively. Moreover, for remote users the shipping of the new image over the WAN is a big challenge in its own right, and often requires an image-server infrastructure from which the desktop can PXE-boot.

Using Wanova, the IT administrator simply invoked a “Reinforce Base Image” operation, which applied a clean base image on the endpoint that corrected the system and all corporate applications, while preserving her personalized applications and user-data. The user’s system was up and running with a clean OS and a fully operational Office suite within an hour. Our customer’s initial reaction was “Wow.” Then, after a (we think, stunned and amazed) pause, he said, “It usually takes a week for a user to get back to a full working environment – my users hate this. And the best thing, I can apply this same magic both to my local and remote employees. This is awesome!”

Finally, another customer had a dead laptop. Rather than sending the laptop back and having the user down for several days, IT simply migrated the user’s CVD to a new laptop (different hardware, incidentally) using the correct base image for the new hardware. Further, all user data, personalization and locally installed applications were also installed. Because Wanova first downloads the minimal working set, the user was up and running again in 20 minutes. Any missing data was streamed in the background. After seeing this process, the customer said, “This is a game-changer. We just took a process that is extremely painful and time-consuming – both for us and and for the end-user — and completed it in minutes!”