Like I mention above, the biggest feature for me is now the ability to do PCoIP through the Security Server. Before this functionality was available you were either required to use RDP or you must VPN into the network where the View Connection Broker server was located, but this typically wouldn’t work because of the added latency the VPN tunnel would create.

All of the updates in this release can be found in the official release notes, however here are the hot what’s new items:

• Security servers can now accommodate PCoIP connections – Security servers now include a PCoIP Secure Gateway component. The PCoIP Secure Gateway connection offers the following advantages:
  • The only remote desktop traffic that can enter the corporate data center is traffic on behalf of a strongly authenticated user.
  • Users can access only the desktop resources that they are authorized to access.
  • No VPN is required, as long as PCoIP is not blocked by any networking component.
  • Security servers with PCoIP support run on Windows Server 2008 R2 and take full advantage of the 64-bit architecture.
• Enhanced USB device compatibility – View 4.6 supports USB redirection for syncing and managing iPhones and iPads with View desktops. This release also includes improvements for using USB scanners, and adds to the list of USB printers that you can use with thin clients. For more information, see the list of View Client resolved issues.
• Keyboard mapping improvements – Many keyboard-related issues have been fixed. For more information, see the list of View Client resolved issues.
• New timeout setting for SSO users – With the single-sign-on (SSO) feature, after users authenticate to View Connection Server, they are automatically logged in to their View desktop operating systems. This new timeout setting allows administrators to limit the number of minutes that the SSO feature is valid for.
  • For example, if an administrator sets the time limit to 10 minutes, then 10 minutes after the user authenticates to View Connection Server, the automatic login ability expires. If the user then walks away from the desktop and it becomes inactive, when the user returns, the user is prompted for login credentials. For more information, see the VMware View Administration documentation.
• VMware View 4.6 includes more than 160 bug fixes – For descriptions of selected resolved issues, see Resolved Issues.
• Experimental support for Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 RC operating systems

Before I get into the details of what’s new in this major dot release one must ponder why this release goes against the VMware version standards that were placed when vSphere 4.0 was released.  How come this version isn’t 4.1? Or furthermore how come vSphere 4.1 isn’t vSphere 4.5 — there were definitely enough enhancements for vS 4.1 to be a major release.

Anyways it is what it is and perhaps we could expect something even greater from the vSphere family before it’s next major version (5.0), which has been hinted in this YouTube (at 1:32) video showing the upcoming iPad vSphere Management App.

So now back to our regularly scheduled program….what’s new in View 4.5:

• View Client with Local Mode- Provides the industry’s first integrated offline and server-hosted solution for desktop virtualization, addressing BYOPC use cases.
• Full Windows 7 support- Provides full support for Windows 7. With View 4.5 and ThinApp 4.6, organizations can migrate to Windows 7 at half the cost and time.
• View Client for Mac OS X – Enables Mac users to access hosted Windows virtual desktops, extending the BYOPC use cases to Mac users.
• Integrated Application Assignment- Simplifies the delivery of ThinApp applications to end-users using the View Administrator console.
• Rich Graphical Dashboards – Simplifies management and monitoring through improved reporting and diagnostics.
• Role Based Administration – Distributes IT tasks to the right administrator.
• Integration with Microsoft SCOM and PowerShell – Enables integration into existing management infrastructure to further simplify the management of View virtual desktops, as described in the new VMware View Integration Guide.
• Support for vSphere 4.1 and vCenter 4.1- Delivers integration with the most widely-deployed desktop virtualization platform in the industry. Takes advantage of optimizations for View virtual desktops.
• Increased scalability – Allows you to deploy 10,000 virtual desktops per pod and use this modular architecture to scale out across your organization. For more information, see the VMware View Architecture Planning Guide.
• Tiered storage support – Reduces the cost and increases the performance of storage by enabling you to take advantage of multiple storage tiers, including high performance and locally attached storage.
• Lowest Cost Reference Architectures- VMware has worked with partners such as Dell, HP, Cisco, NetApp, and EMC to provide prescriptive reference architectures to enable you to deploy a scalable and cost-effective desktop virtualization solution.

So I’d like to focus on one of these enhancements as I feel it provides one of the greatest reasons to go to View 4.5 as well as some game-changing design considerations, Tiered Storage Support.

The concept behind Tiered Storage Support is to effectively separate your desktop replicas from your linked clones. So if you’re thinking…why does it matter? Let’s dive a little deeper into why this is such a critical feature.

Say you have a 1,000 desktop virtual environment running on View 4.0, lets also say that these desktops require ~20 IOPs/user and that your storage array is utilizing 15k RPM fibre-channel disks. You would roughly need 111 drives to meet the IO load for these users (250 for SATA), and that’s not even calculating RAID or Hot Spares for that matter – we’re just using raw numbers to keep this simple.

So taking that previous paragraph into consideration, lets say we upgrade to View 4.5 and can now place that replica on an EFD tier. On average an EFD drive will handle ~3,500 IOP/s – taking this into mind we can effectively meet the IO needs of our 1,000 desktop users with 6 EFD drives…that’s right 6!

Just imagine the cost savings, not only CAPEX but OPEX from all power/cooling savings. EFD for replicas and SATA for linked clone and deltas — doesn’t get much more efficient than that….or does it?  Check out this really cool blog post from Chad Sakac on what EMC is doing with EFD drives to effectively achieve 2TB of additional Read/Write cache on their mid-range storage array.

Earlier today VMware became aware of an issue affecting users of VMware View after applying Update 2 to their ESX 4.0 hosts. The problem only effects PCoIP, RDP works normally. There is a discussion of the problem in the VMware Communities here.

While our IT Teams work to resolve the issue, the Knowledge Base Team has responded by creating an up-to-the-minute live document at: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1022830 and using @vmwarecares and @vmwarekb Twitter accounts to alert customers.

This Knowledge Base article will be updated as new information becomes available. If you have been affected by this, please read the KB.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. If you know how to spread the word to your friends and colleagues, please do so.

What does this mean?  Well, with Fast Clones you are now offloading the great ability to do Linked Clones back to the storage array. You can ultimately have hundreds of copies of a single virtual machine which only using minimal disk space, and now with the plug-in have those automatically provisioned into VMware View.

Fast, Easy and Efficient…just how we like it!

Download the high-rez versions here: WMV and MOV

One prerequisite is that you’re running on VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 or at least Update 3 of the VI 3.5 Suite.

The most anticipated feature (IMO) with View 4 is full PCoIP support, which brings a full rich desktop experience regardless of the connection type (LAN or WAN). This truly means that virtualized desktops are a viable option for almost any environment now.  Another amazing feature of PCoIP is the ability to support up to four monitors so now even my desktop could be a virtual one.

Here are a few of the other new features found in the VMware View 4 Release Notes:

VMware View 4  Release Notes
What’s New

Enhanced single sign-on – The Log in as current user feature is integrated with Active Directory and smart cards to help simplify the process of logging in to a VMware View desktop.

Restricted entitlements – Administrators can control user access to virtual desktops based on the View Connection Server being used for authentication.

Smart card policies – Administrators can set group policies to force desktop disconnection and require reconnection when users remove smart cards.

Domain filtering – You can use vdmadmin.exe to control the accessibility of domains and traverse trust relationships more quickly.

You can cleanly delete View desktops using scripts.

You can log in to View desktops using user principal names (UPN).

You can explicitly configure IP addresses to override those supplied by the View Agent when accessing a desktop.

Mixed Active Directory and Kerberos authentication is supported.

From viewing the VMware HCL it appears that there are a number of Thin Clients that already have full support for PCoIP and View 4.

Another topic of discussion on Twitter was the Guest O/S support matrix, there were concerns that Windows 7 wouldn’t be supported as a Guest.  From what I’ve read in KB 1015591 it appears that there is full support for Windows 95/98, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Ultimate, Business or Enterprise, and Windows 7.

So, go download your trial today and experience a true rich experience that PCoIP can provide.

For the most part you should all understand the concept of VMware View and virtualized desktops.  Virtualized Desktops are simply Virtual Machines with a desktop operating system installed (Windows 7, etc.) running on the VMware vSphere platform.  They are delivered and managed through the VMware View Manager, this utility allows the creation and assignment of these desktop virtual machines.

So, what is new in VMware View 4?

• 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.

In addition to PCoIP VMware View 4 supports ALP, RDP and RGS protocols.  Sadly Offline Desktop is still an experimental feature as well as Windows 7 host and guest support.

For additional details and features available in VMware View 4 please see the release notes: http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/view_pubs.html

Update: VMware View 4 is still not available for download as of the writing of this post, I really expect to see this within the next week or two.  To be notified when the download is available you can sign up for the evaluation at https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/?p=default

On a side note, for those of you that haven’t noticed, when you visit the VMware website you’ll now be greeted with the new VMware branding as well as a new color scheme….which I’m not sure if I like.