VMware presents View 4 with software PC-over-IP.

Today VMware presented the most freshest version of their desktop software product, View 4. This new release has two main new features:

* A software-based, PC-over-IP remoting protocol is built-in
* View now runs on vSphere 4. (Completely new feature!!)

The remaining major features of View have not been updated, including:

* View Composer is the same as before.
* Offline VDI is still experimental.
* ThinApp is the same.
* VMware CVP (the client hypervisor) is still not available. (1H10 is the current ETA.)
* Windows 7 is not supported. (It’s there as “experimental.”)
* RTO Software’s Virtual Profiles product (which VMware announced they would OEM), is NOT yet included.

While there are many advantages to basing your VDI infrastructure on vSphere 4 (which we’ll look at later in this article), it looks like the only major new View-specific feature is PC-over-IP (despite the fact there are hundreds of people on the desktop team).

VMware’s software PC-over-IP protocol better be pretty good!
How good is the software PC-over-IP?

I have no idea. I haven’t used it yet. I did just get the release code from VMware for View 4 over the weekend, so Gabe and I will put it through its tests and see if PC-over-IP is as good as VMware claims it is. For the record, I don’t think PC-over-IP has to be as good as HDX—it just has to be good enough for people to use.

And certainly VMware claims it’s ready. Everyone there seems really proud of the work they did getting PC-over-IP to run in software. They claim their implementation works on the LAN and the WAN and across wide samples of latency, bandwidth, and packet loss. They talk about how it’s dynamically adaptive, both changing as network characteristics change and based on what’s on the screen (apps, text, Flash, etc.). VMware also points out that PC-over-IP remotes the entire client experience, so you get stuff like multiple monitors and USB redirection.

The idea for View 4 is that PC-over-IP will replace RDP with TCX as the “go to” protocol for View and will be used by everyone. My understanding is right now there’s only a client for Windows, but they want to release a Mac client in the future. And software and hardware PC-over-IP clients and hosts will be interchangeable, so you could also use a thin client device with a hardware chip in it with the software PC-over-IP of View 4.

In fact VMware is really proud of the ecosystem developing around PC-over-IP, even releasing a press release talking about it. (Although for some reason the first partner mentioned in the PC-over-IP ecosystem press release is Cisco, and after talking about their WAN optimization which has nothing to do with PC-over-IP, they talk about the security of the Nexus 1000V!?! Come on.. this is a press release just about PC-over-IP!) But if you get through that weird Cisco part of the release, you’ll see HP, Dell, Devon IT, and Wyse talking about how they support the protocol.

Obviously View 4 will still support RDP-based connections as well for older or non-Windows clients. VMware had previously some of Wyse’s TCX extensions for RDP to help make it a better experience. I assume that agreement continues, although I don’t know for sure. (I asked on Friday but haven’t yet heard back on that. I’ll update this when I do.)
Running desktops on vSphere 4

VMware will be spending a lot of time talking about how good vSphere 4 is and why it’s the best platform for desktop virtualization.

That may be true, but what’s kind of weird is that other desktop virtualization products like Citrix XenDesktop and Quest vWorkspace also have the ability to run on vSphere. So a “win” for vSphere, while certainly a “win” for VMware, is not necessarily a “win” for View. (Does that make sense?)

I guess really the win for View when it comes to vSphere is that when you buy View, you get the highest-end edition (Enterprise Plus) included with your purchase. (Brilliant move, btw!) Customers who chose vSphere for with non-View VDI products would have to buy vSphere licenses on top of whatever desktop product they’re using. (And vSphere isn’t cheap, starting a $800 per processor and climbing to a whopping $3500 per processor for the Enterprise Plus edition that comes with View!)

And even though there’s nothing stopping customers from buying the $3500 per processor license for their VDI environments, it’s most likely that customers will opt for one of the cheaper editions, believing that most of the high-end virtualization infrastructure features included in the top package don’t really matter for their VDI desktops. So while that might be true, it also means that since both VMware View editions do include the highest end vSphere edition, you really need to look at those features and consider them as part of the value you get with View that you wouldn’t get somewhere else. For example, VMware Distributed Resource Schedule (DRS) watches server load and dynamically moves VMs (via live migration) across physical hosts. This could allow you to consolidate VMs to fewer servers to shut down hosts to save power. And since DRS is part of the super expensive version of vSphere that’s included with View, you could claim that as a feature of View even though it’s technically made possible by the underlying vSphere.

by Brian Madden
Source: http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/