VMware View Bolts On Additional Virtual Desktop Control

View 5 enhances remote desktop throttling to improve performance.

VMware View 5 improves the end-user experience when employing PC over Internet Protocol display-compression technology by adding throttling that cuts back network usage. View 5 also added Persona, VMware's entry into user-profile management, a much-needed feature to keep up in the competitive virtual desktop arena.

View 5 is focused on improving the user experience, including the release of View client support for Mac and Android-based devices. While these changes add functionality to View, much of the performance improvements that eWEEK Labs tests showed stemmed from new ways to restrict features. In particular, PCoIP bandwidth controls make it easier to smooth out View client network usage. The trade-off for this gain in responsiveness is at least a temporary decrease in image fidelity.

Installing and using VMware View 5 is no small task. Only organizations with significant technology experts on staff and a strategic plan that calls for replacing traditional desktop systems with virtual machines hosted in the data center should consider installing View 5.

Successfully rolling out View 5 will require senior engineers with expert implementation skills in local- and wide-area networking, desktop deployment, storage, virtual and physical system management, database and Active Directory planning and management-at a minimum. On top of these technical experts, add license analysts to thoroughly assess the VMware and end-user license costs of the project. The VMware licensing upset that happened when vSphere 5 was released this summer doesn't significantly affect View 5 implementations. Virtual desktop infrastructure, including vSphere 5 and vCenter Server, are licensed separately from VMware's server virtualization products when used for desktop deployments.

VMware View 5 became available Oct. 14 and costs $150 per concurrent use for the Enterprise license or $250 per concurrent use for the Premier license. The main difference between the two license keys is that Premier users also get access to the new View Persona user profile capability.

How I Tested the Technoloy

I started off by spending a lot of time with the more than 700 pages of documentation that come with View 5. Most of the work involved in setting up a View 5 infrastructure should be figured out on paper long before the first piece of View 5 infrastructure is in place.