VMware has released View 5.1. The main points in this release surround Total Cost of Ownership, Simplified Management and Increased IT Control, and Virtual Desktop Experience.
VMware View 5.1: Simplifying the Delivery of a Better Desktop – VMware View 5.1 will continue to enable the industry’s best end-user experience while simplifying IT management for large-scale deployments and reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with a virtual desktop infrastructure by up to 50 percent.
Reduced TCO – New storage capabilities in VMware View 5.1 enabled by VMware View Storage Accelerator will reduce shared storage costs by optimizing shared storage loads. A Tech Preview of VMware View Composer Array Integration (VCAI) will leverage the native cloning abilities in the storage array to offload storage operations to improve provisioning speeds. In addition, VMware View Persona Management will extend to physical desktops, preserving user settings across all Windows devices and streamlining the migration from physical to stateless virtual desktops.
Simplified Management and Increased IT Control – Enhancements to VMware View 5.1 will enable IT organizations to streamline key IT processes such as provisioning, configuration management, connection brokering, policy enforcement, performance monitoring, and application assignment from a single management console. VMware View also enables IT organizations to increase security and compliance by moving data into the data center, centrally enforcing endpoint security and policy configuration and streamlining anti virus processes.
Industry’s Best Virtual Desktop Experience – VMware View 5.1 features a new USB stack that will improve device support, while integration of RADIUS two-factor authentication will provide users and organizations greater security choices. VMware View with PCoIP® adapts to the end user’s network connection to provide a high-quality, customized desktop experience over the LAN and WAN. Users can connect to their VMware View desktop from a variety of mobile and fixed endpoints with updated clients for Mac, Windows and Linux desktops, thin or zero clients, and Apple iPad, Android and Amazon Kindle Fire tablets.
Microsoft recently released User Experience Virtualization. With UE-V nothing roams unless specifically included in templates. A template is an XML file that describes where settings are stored in the file system and in the registry. Typically one template per application or Windows component is used.
UE-V comes with the following ready-to-use templates:
The next release of Microsoft’s Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) will include a new major release of App-V (App-V 5.0) as well as a new very interesting product called User Experience Virtualization (UE-V). UE-V is a user state virtualization product that allows individuals to change devices without reconfiguring applications or settings in Windows 7 or Windows 8. By implementing UE-V, IT departments can enable a consistent experience for users who have multiple devices provided by their company or choose to bring their personal PC or tablet to work. Now users can change their device and keep their experience without reconfiguring applications each time they login to Windows 7 or Windows 8.
Regardless if it is a rich desktop or a hosted VDI desktop, a traditional application or a virtual application, UE-V enables a personal, consistent Windows experience across devices, matching each person’s unique work style for increased productivity anytime, anywhere. UE-V integrates with our Microsoft Desktop Virtualization products and can be deployed with System Center Configuration Manager, as well as third party management tools.
Windows Server 8 is coming and it is packed full of new features. Among the new features are A LOT of Remote Desktop Services improvements. Some of the improvements include:
- Simplified Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployment and management
- Simplified Session Virtualization deployment and management
- Centralized resource publishing
- Rich user experience with Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)
- Rich Windows desktop remoting experience
- Smooth audio and video playback experience
- Rich graphics and video user experience over a WAN
- Enhanced device remoting support with USB Redirection for Session Virtualization and VDI
- True Multi-Touch and gesture remoting
The RDS team has posted several documents to help you get started on your own including their test lab guides. These guides take you step-by-step through several aspects of configuring these new capabilities.
Dell has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Wyse Technology, the global leader in cloud client computing, to significantly extend its desktop virtualization offerings. The proposed combination of Dell and Wyse Technology creates an industry-leader that offers customers an alternative compute model directly from Dell or through our channel partners – which will help enterprises enhance security, streamline desktop management, and boost user productivity
Wyse Technology’s Chief Executive Tarkan Maner said the following in a press release:
“The combination of Wyse and Dell provides us with tremendous growth opportunities for our core desktop virtualization business, helps us expand into new and fast-growing market segments including mobility and cloud computing, and provides us with reach and scale we did not previously have.”
This seems like a natural fit for both companies visions. The desktop virtualization play was kind of obvious to me, but the cloud computing thing was a little bit of a mystery as I don’t really think Cloud when I think Wyse. However, checking out this video shows Cloud is top of mind for Wyse and Dell. It will be interesting to see how all this fits together.
One of the new features of vSphere 4.1 is called Storage IO Control (SIOC). SIOC is aimed at alleviating one of the most prevalent issues with hardware virtualization today - storage. Cormac Hogan recently wrote a blog post detailing some of the top myths about SIOC as well as addressing these. This post came from Cormac’s field experience with customers and will hopefully clear the air on SIOC. Some of the myths/points addressed were:
Some customers don’t actually know about this feature and what it does.
Some customers find that it is too difficult to configure.
The feature is not granular enough.
Customers who require all VMs to get equal access to the datastore don’t believe that they need SIOC.
Some customers are finding it hard to identify the correct latency threshold to set on the datastore.
Some customers mentioned that they are seeing ‘external workloads’ causing issues for SIOC.
Certain customers couldn’t use it because they do not have correct licensing edition.
Lastly, some customers are using a version of vSphere that doesn’t have SIOC.
I came across this really cool tool from Quest the other day. The Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer runs several checks against existing VDI deployed desktops or templates used for deployment. Although optimized for Quest vWorkspace environments, the Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer will work just as well in Citrix XenDesktop or VMware View environments.
Currently there are 40 optimizations. Settings are enabled when checked. You can add your own optimizations by editing the configuration file of the of the Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer. This configuration file is stored in an XML file that needs to be in the same directory as the Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer EXE file.
Last year, Pierre Marmignon released VUEM - a User Environment Management solution. I have personally used this product and it is very easy and works great. Recently, version 1.6 of VUEM was released. Some of the new features in 1.6 include:
Revamped graphical user interface
VUEM used to help you eliminate scripts? Now we also take away all those complex GPOs and environmental settings as well. For a truly really FAST workspace configuration and deployment then light speed login time (sub 10 seconds anyone?).
You can add context awareness filters to every action so your workspace behave depending on where the user is, what he does, what time it is, if he is on your LAN or not, etc. pretty much any scenario you can think off with any level of granularity.
All actions (like adding a network drive, shortcuts, registry entries, etc.) are now reversible and every changes can be applied immediately and seamlessly to the user workspace, no need to reboot. Day to day management is made almost too easy.
This is only the beginning of the list and hopefully you are getting a sense of why we are excited about this. Some of these new features will of course make it into our free community version which is already in production in so many customers environments. The rest of the new stuffs will be available into our Enterprise edition with a price tag that will be a no brainer to all of you guys: by far the best TCO and the best ROI on the market.
Have you heard of the ZDNet debate series? This is where ZDNet hosts a virtual debate between 2 heavy-hitters. On March 15th, ZDNet hosted a debate between Microsoft and VMware about their server virtualization products. The debaters were Jason Perlow (for Microsoft Hyper-V) and Ken Hess (for VMware). The moderator was Jason Hiner and the questions included things like:
Why hasn’t Hyper-V already crushed VMware?
What are the functionality differences between Hyper-V and VMware? Is there true feature parity?
Are Citrix and Red Hat going to be major players in the data center over the next 2-4 years or is this destined to turn into a two-horse race?
Costs.
Does Hyper-V really save money?
Private cloud.
The Novell Netware comparison.
And more…
In the end, the ZDNet gave VMware the win for best argument, but the audience gave the win to Microsoft overall (barely).
There are some really cool new features in Windows Server 8 - especially surrounding Hyper-V and storage. Aidan Finn wrote a really good article detailing some of the new Hyper-V features, but I wanted to bring your attention to one in particular - storage live migration. The details are toward the end of the article, but here are the highlights:
“Say you want to move a VM’s storage from location A to location B. The first step done is to copy the files.
IO operations to the source VHD are obviously continuing because the VM is still running. We cannot just flip the VM over after the copy, and lose recent actions on the source VHD. For this reason, the VHD stack simultaneously writes to both the source and destination VHDs as the copy process is taking place.
Once the VHD is successfully copied, the VM can switch IO so it only targets the new storage location. The old storage location is finished with, and the source files are removed. Note that they are only removed after Hyper-V knows that they are no longer required. In other words, there is a fall back in case something goes wrong with the Live Storage Migration.
