The W.P. Cary School of Business at Arizona State University in Phoenix wants to make sure its MBA students stay connected. IT managers there also want to make sure the school's network stays secure.

So for the past few years, the school has used VMware's Workstation product, which creates isolated virtual computing environments that include an operating system, applications, data and security, in a software file on the computer.

The trouble is that Workstation was complex and required technical expertise. This became a burden as the school looked at launching virtual machine software on hundreds of personal laptops and PCs.

"We wanted a lighter-weight version of Workstation," says Scott Worthington, technology support analyst senior [sic] at ASU.

Worthington also wanted a more fine-grained way to secure and manage the virtual machines running on the end-user devices.

What he got was VMware ACE (Assured Computing Environment), a product that takes VMware's virtualization expertise and brings it to x86-based personal laptops and PCs, while giving IT administrators the ability to tightly control and manage what kind of access users have from their client devices.

With ACE, an IT desktop manager can set policies for a virtual machine and then give end users a DVD that they load onto their PCs.

"I really consider [ACE] to be a kind of media player because that's all it does. It simply plays the image," says Worthington, who provided user input to VMware during the creation of ACE and was one of more than 1,000 users who beta-tested the software this fall. VMware began shipping ACE in December.

Analysts say VMware ACE is a natural extension for the company that specializes in virtualization software on servers. A subsidiary of EMC, VMware sees virtualization as an enterprise-wide strategy, they say.

"VMware looks at ACE as a very strategic capability that will allow incrementally over time the construction of a completely virtual environment where resources and applications move around to best meet service requirements and work around failures in the environment," says Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of system software at IDC.

Kusnetzky says others, such as Microsoft with Virtual PC and SWsoft with Virtuozzo, have virtual machine technology.