The long awaited VMware View 4 was announced yesterday along side a newly refreshed VMware website. The biggest features for most are the PCoIP technology that VMware have teamed up with Teradici to enhance the user experience, allow streaming video and enhanced graphics and progressive build up of images so even on a slow connection you are still able to make the most of your view environment. The other feature is of course the introduction of vSphere support, for many this now means a vSphere upgrade can now be completed.
The full list of new features is as follows
- PCoIP – A display protocol specifically developed for virtual desktop
delivery. PCoIP is able to dynamically detect and adapt to the end users
network connection providing each user with the best desktop experience
regardless of location or task. VMware View with PCoIP is delivered with
support for software end points, which include the View Client and a
VMware View virtual desktop. In addition to software support, the VMware
View solution also supports PCoIP enabled end points to address the
requirements of even the highest end users - vSphere Support – Provides the foundation for VMware View and helps
to extend the power of the datacenter to the desktop environment by
delivering powerful business continuity and disaster recovery features
such as VMotion, High Availability, Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS)
and Consolidated Back Up. Optimized specifically for VMware View
desktop workloads, VMware vSphere is able to scale to support 1000s of
desktops to meet the requirements of even the largest organizations. In
addition vCenter helps organizations to manage more than 1,000 hosts
and up to 10,000 Virtual Machines from a single console providing a
common platform to manage both servers and desktops from the
datacenter to the cloud with unparalleled levels of scale, control and
automation. - Simplified Sign On – Addresses the need for a seamless end user
experience when logging into a VMware View virtual desktop from a
physical thin client or workstation. With Simplified Sign On user
credentials entered into the local client can be reused to authenticate the
user as they log into their virtual desktop. This makes the login process
simple and efficient. - Restricted Entitlements – Enables to ability to restrict user access to
desktop pools based on the connection server being used for access.
With connection servers being deployed across different networks, IT
organizations can enforce access based on the user’s location.
Depending on how the connection server is configured a group of users
can be either permitted or denied access to their virtual desktop according
to the connection server being used for access.
I was also presently surprised to see the VMware website has had a refresh, I was pleased to see that nearly every page now has a related video which I think helps hold the customers attention and help them get the information they need. Information now seems simpler to find with better navigation and I am pleased that this has also spread through to the partner site for those that are VMware partners.
I haven’t seen any GA date yet but from what I have heard I believe this should be some time next week, also from rumours this sounds like update 1 for vSphere maybe coming out around the same time.
Virtualised Reality 