VMware View - 6

This report shows that in a true apples-to-apples comparison where lossy and lossless policies are applied equally to both platforms to yield a comparable user experience, VMware View 5 demonstrates equal or better efficiency in bandwidth consumption and in client and server side CPU utilization when compared to Citrix XenDesktop 5.5 on common office applications. This advantage in efficiency can translate into great density, better user experience and lower cost for an organization using VDI technologies.

VMware View Client for iPad is the first iPad client with support for the PCoIP display protocol for tight integration with VMware View and increased flexibility for the end-user. Enable end-users to simply and securely connect to their View-Based Windows desktop from an iPad with the best possible user experience on the Local Area Network (LAN) or across a Wide Area Network (WAN). The improvements in this new 1.4 version are:

• Improved connection times to View server
• Improved support for external monitors
• Bug fixes

In this video Raymond van't Hag over at bright-streams.com will show you a quick tour through the VMware View Manager Console. 

I bet there still are a lot of people who haven’t seen or touched the View Manager Console. With this video, I wanted to give you an overview of what it looks like, how navigation via links is been done and how you can find information about users, pools and your environment.

The majority of business-critical applications such as Web applications, database servers, and enterprise messaging systems have been successfully virtualized, proving the benefits of virtualization for reducing cost and streamlining IT management. However, the adoption of virtualization in the area of latency-sensitive applications has been slow partly due to unsubstantiated performance concerns. By taking VoIP service as an example, this paper demonstrates that vSphere 5 brings the same virtualization benefits to latency-sensitive applications, and vSphere 5 does this while driving good performance. In particular, vSphere 5 delivers excellent out-of-the-box performance in terms of voice quality when running VoIP service. VoIP applications are characterized by latency-sensitivity that dictates audio data be delivered at regular intervals to achieve good voice quality. Irregular delivery may lead to packet drops, severely deteriorating user experience. Therefore, timely processing and delivery of audio data is critically important to VoIP service. In the virtualized environment, however, meeting this requirement for VoIP applications is more challenging due to the additional layer of scheduling virtual machines (VMs) and processing network packets. Despite such challenges, vSphere 5 is able to achieve great performance for VoIP applications thanks to the following reasons. First, vSphere 5 facilitates the highly optimized networking stack and paravirtualized device drivers to minimize virtualization overhead, adding little variance in packet delivery1. The overhead is usually in the order of tens of microseconds that are negligible, especially to VoIP applications, where packets need to be delivered at intervals of tens of milliseconds. Second, vSphere 5 gives each VM a fair share of CPU2, ensuring the predictable processing of audio data even under high CPU contention when running multiple VMs. Finally, the Network I/O Control (NetIOC) feature allows VoIP traffic to be isolated by partitioning physical network bandwidth. This helps to achieve the intended voice quality when VoIP traffic competes for shared network resources. This paper illustrates that: • Excellent out-of-the-box VoIP performance is achieved with a large number of users served by a commercial VoIP media server hosted on vSphere 5. • vSphere 5 is able to maintain great VoIP performance when running a large number of instances of VoIP server; results showed that vSphere 5 provided good performance even when running 12 instances configured with a total of 48 vCPUs on a system with 8 cores, utilizing more than 90% of the physical CPUs. • With Network I/O Control (NetIOC), vSphere 5 is able to preserve voice quality under high contention for network resources.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/voip-perf-vsphere5.pdf

VMware® ThinApp™ is an agentless application virtualization solution that decouples applications from their underlying operating systems to eliminate application conflict and streamline application delivery and management. ThinApp simplifies application virtualization and enables IT administrators to quickly deploy, efficiently manage, and upgrade applications without risk. With ThinApp, an entire Windows application and its settings can be packaged into a single executable and deployed to many different Windows operating systems without imposing additional cost and complexity to the server or client. Application virtualization with ThinApp eliminates conflicts at the application and operating system level and minimizes costly recoding and regression testing to speed application migration to Windows 7.

ThinApp virtualizes applications by encapsulating application files and registry settings into a single ThinApp package. IT administrators can deploy, manage, and update these ThinApp packages independently from the underlying operating system (OS). The virtualized applications do not make any changes to the underlying OS and behave the same across different desktop configurations, which provides a stable, consistent end-user experience, and ease of management.

As a key component of VMware View™, ThinApp adds smooth application management to your virtual desktop deployment. View is VMware’s virtual desktop offering, fully integrated with all of the advanced virtual infrastructure features of vSphere. You can manage and assign ThinApp virtualized applications in the same interface where you deploy and manage virtual desktops: the View Administrator console. Users access their View desktops from a wide variety of devices: from a Windows or Mac computer, from a Linux thin client or zero client, or from an iPad or Android tablet.

With ThinApp 4.7, administrators now have the capability of deploying ThinApp virtualized applications in Horizon Application Manager™. Horizon Application Manager is an enterprise-level, cloud-based application catalog and reporting mechanism that provides secure, managed user access to SaaS applications, federated web applications, and ThinApp virtualized Windows applications, all with a single sign-on using Windows Active Directory credentials. Horizon provides a new management platform for entitling, deploying, and monitoring ThinApp packages.

VMware ThinApp - Reviewer’s Guide

Some things never change. Or do they? Every new VMware vSphere release changes the characteristics and performance of virtual machines. If you’re not up to speed, you’ll probably manage your environment on old, no-longer accurate information. The vMythbusters have collected the hottest virtualization topics discussed in virtualization communities, blogs and Twitter. Join expert virtualization blogger Eric Sloof and Virtualization Evangelist Mattias Sundling to see what happens when we put these topics to the test in our lab to determine if they are myth or truth.

Mythbusting Goes Virtual - Webcast Playback

This video will show you how ThinApp and Horizon Application Manager together are improving the management and entitlement of applications.

http://vmware.com/go/thinapp

VMware View Client for iPad makes it easy to access your Windows virtual desktop from your iPad with the best possible user experience on the Local Area Network (LAN) or across a Wide Area Network (WAN).

What's New in Version 1.2

- Optimized for VMware View 5 with improved performance
- Support for iOS 5 including AirPlay
- Presentation Mode for use with external display and AirPlay
- Embedded RSA soft token simplifies login to desktop
- Background tasking to move between Windows and iOS apps
- Updated look and feel
- Integrated online help
- Buffered text input for multibyte text entry
- Now in French, German, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese
- Bug fixes

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vmware-view-for-ipad/id417993697

The combination of View 5 and vSphere 5 deliver significant improvements in user experience and consolidation ratios, while at the same time delivering significant reductions in bandwidth consumption. This paper highlights how enhancements to View’s PCoIP lossless compression algorithm and support for client-side image caching in combination deliver up to 75% bandwidth reduction in both WAN and LAN conditions when compared with the previous release of View.

Further this paper illustrates how, across all network configurations, View 5 delivers improved user experience compared with other VDI solution, while consuming significantly less bandwidth and CPU resources than Microsoft RDP7 and comparable bandwidth to Citrix HDX.

Finally, while the View 5 PCoIP protocol dynamically adapts to changing network and CPU constraints, ensuring great experience out-of-the-box, this paper lists a number of environment variables and VDI best practices that ensure users can get the most out of their VDI environment.

VMware View 5 Performance and Best Practices

This white paper describes a VMware best practices approach businesses can use to build View data protection solutions for the datacenter. The paper provides a reference architecture that can be used to develop VMware View backup and recovery solutions. It also describes backup and restore scenarios for View storage components and procedures for implementing these scenarios. Note that this paper does not address disaster recovery procedures for the View environment.

In particular, a well-planned View backup strategy improves business infrastructure availability. Implementing a stateless desktop architecture removes the need to backup virtual desktop machines, thus removing virtual Infrastructure complexity, which simplifies manageability and can reduce support cost. For highly critical systems, VMware also recommends implementing high availability architecture for virtual desktops.

Deployment and technical Considetation Guide - VMware View Backup Best Practices