Together with VMware View 5.1, they also announced the new clients for this version. There are a lot of great enhancements here as well. Pay attention for the new ARM based Linux client.

What’s New in ALL View Clients
- Optimized for VMware View 5.1
- Up to 3X better video playback performance
- Improved mouse responsiveness in virtual machine
- RADIUS two factor authentication with VMware View 5.1

What’s New in ALL Mobile View Clients 1.5
- Save password option if administrator enables new VMware View 5.1 policy
- French, German, Spanish keyboard support with VMware View 5.1
- Direct Korean language input support with VMware View 5.1
- Touch in text fields brings up keyboard with VMware View 5.1

Windows – What’s New in View Client 5.1
- Local mode supports hardware version 8 virtual machines with VMware View 5.1

Linux – What’s New in View Client 1.5
- New ARM based Linux client for Thin Client partner integration

Mac – What’s New in View Client 1.5
- Initial support for Mac OS X Mountain Lion
- Greatly improved audio/video synchronization
- Resolve mouse tracking problems when switching to and from View client

iPad –  What’s New in View Client 1.5
- Support for the new iPad
- Updated look and feel
- Extended software keyboard keys no longer cover Start menu and task bar with external keyboards

Android – What’s New in View Client 1.5
- Support for Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS)
- Mouse support with hover, right click and scroll wheel on ICS
- Updated look and feel and improvements for smaller screens
- New Settings dialog includes security mode settings

All downloads are available in English, German, French, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese.

Link: https://www.vmware.com/go/viewclients

VMware has announced the General Availability of VMware View 5.1, the newest version of it’s enterprise desktop virtualization solution. The new version comes with the following enhancements:

• Storage performance optimization & integration options leveraging vSphere
  • View Storage Accelerator:
  • View Composer API Integration(Tech Preview):
  • Customizable View Composer disposable disk driver letter
  • Support up to 32 (increased from host in a cluster when Network Attached Storage is in use
• USB redirection enhancement
• RADIUS based two-factor authentication support
• Admin UI usability and performance enhancements
• Support pre-created Active Directory machine accounts
• Customer Experience Improvement Program
• Persona Management for physical devices
• Persona Management as a XP to Win7 migration tool
• Support Installation of View Composer server in a standalone server separate from vCenter server
• A set of new View Clients
• Continue PCoIP protocol performance enhancements

To download the software please visit your new MyVMware portal.

Link: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_view/5_1

For a limited time VMware customers are going to get 50 Horizon AppManager Licenses for free when they purchase a VMware vSphere Essential Plus or higher edition. This includes 1 year of SnS for the 50 licenses of AppManager at no charge as of the VMware promo page. (See link)

Link:http://www.vmware.com/landing_pages/horizon-app-manager-promo.html

Thanks to Eric Sloof who brought up a new VMware View book by virtualization consultant Paul O’Doherty today. The book isn’t available yet but as of Amazon should be on 3rd September. Here’s the description:

Discover the powerful and cost saving new virtualization opportunities on the client side with VMware View 5! In VMware View 5: Building a Successful Virtual Desktop, leading virtualization consultant Paul O’Doherty teaches the essentials of View, bringing together critical information, deep insights, and best practices drawn from his extensive experience deploying virtual desktop technology in many of today’s most demanding business environments. O’Doherty walks through every step of View, from the earliest planning phases through configuration, implementation, and management. He illuminates crucial considerations ranging from changes to end-user experience and support considerations through performance management. Readers will learn how to plan and smoothly stage virtual desktop infrastructure deployments, and avoid pitfalls associated with latency, scalability, storage, and networking. Using this books’ proven techniques, virtualization professionals can achieve the full promise of virtualized desktops, dramatically improving system administration productivity while building environments that are more flexible and easier to manage.

Amazon: Link

Link: http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/2042-New-Book-VMware-View-5-Building-a-Successful-Virtual-Desktop.html

Pearson, VMware Press: http://www.pearsonitcertification.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=9780321822345

An interesting blog post was published by VMware today which gives you more information about VMware View in the SMB market. Please take a look at VMware’s EUC blog.

Link: http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2012/05/vdi-in-smbs-not-just-shelfware-study-finds-vmware-leads-with-more-than-half-of-the-installs.html

Thanks to Eric Sloof for publishing a nice article about View 5.1 VAAI integration.

Link: http://ntpro.nl/blog/archives/2039-Video-Provisioning-Virtual-Desktops-with-VMware-View-5.1-with-VAAI.html

Yesterday VMware announced the newest release of VMware View, their enterprise desktop virtualization solution. Since VMware released the first version of View back in 2008 loads of enhancements have gone into the product. This time they focussed on storage, improved scalability and a even better end user experience. So what’s new?

• New USB redirection stack
• Radius authentication
• More clients (i.e. new Mac Clients)
• PCoIP & User experience improvements
• Local mode enhacements
• Admin UI performance enhancements
• Persona Management for physical machines
• Persona Management migration tool
• Support for pre-created Active Directory accounts
• View Storage Accelerator
• Cluster size expansions for NFS datastores
• Standalone View Composer Server

That’s quite a lot so now let’s dig into the most important enhancements in detail.

View Storage Accelerator

The View Storage Accelerator offers storage access optimization to improve the performance and storage cost. Actually it’s an in-memory cache of common block reads and it’s applicable to all types of desktops. It’s 100% server based and transparent to the guest VM with no need for special array integration.

On the business side it will give you reduced storage cost as the storage can be sized for average workloads. The solution deceases the peak IOPS load on the storage and ensures a consistent user experience by handling worst case usage. Especially it will help during boot storms and emergency software deployments such as antivirus pattern updates.

That said it will also allow a larger concurrent user scale on the same resources.

Single host boot storm:

The result will be:

• ˜ 80% reduction in peak IOPS
• ˜ 45% reduction in average IOPS
• ˜ 65% reduction in peak throughput
• ˜ 25% reduction in average throughput

Windows 7 multi host boot storm:

Integration into the View Manager:

View Admin UI Improvements

The View Admin UI was localized into 5 new languages including French, German, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese and it’s compatible with the local browser settings.

Persona Management for physical machines

The Persona Management was already introduced with VMware View 5 but now it’s extended to physical desktops. The Persona management supports Windows 7, Vista and XP and has no infrastructure requirements which less into less management overhead.

2-Factor Radius authentication

With the 2-Factor Radius authentication VMware added support for multiple two-factor authentication vendors like RSA SecurID (Which was already supported before natively), VASCO DIGIPASS, SMS Passcode, SafeNet and others. This is great for the customer as it gives a new choice of authentication vendors and is compatible with previous authentication choices.

Continued PCoIP Performance Improvements

In this released VMware added again optimizations for CPU and bandwidth.

VMware has released a new version of it’s enterprise application virtualization solution ThinApp.

The new version provides a number of key bug fixes and improvements. Please check the release notes for detailed information.

Link: http://blogs.vmware.com/thinapp/2012/04/thinapp-471-released.html

Release Notes: https://www.vmware.com/support/thinapp4/doc/releasenotes_thinapp471.html

When I opened my Zimbra Desktop today I got a notification that the new version 7.1.4 is available. Of course I’ve updated directly.

Here’re the new features / enhancements:

• Users can move folders to “local folders” in Zimbra Desktop by dragging and dropping the folder to the desired location in “local folders”. The folder move might take some time before the move completes, in particular if the folder contains many messages, but also because the process of moving folders happens in the background. The move process copies the messages to the destination, and then deletes the messages from the source. (Bug 42542)
• Only Zimlets that are supported by ZCS are installed by Zimbra Desktop.

These are considered default Zimlets:

Attach Contacts • Phone• Date Highlights • Search• Drag-n-Drop Attachments • Social• Email Attacher • URL Links• Email Contact • WebEx• LinkedIn

• If upgrading from previous installations of Zimbra Desktop, already installed Zimlets remain. (Bug 61927)
• The Socialcast account can now be added and configured using the Social Zimlet. (Bug 60813)
• Zimbra Desktop prompts for a password when it cannot authenticate against the mail server. (Bug 54058)

For the full release notes please visit this link.

Link: http://files.zimbra.com/website/docs/7.1/Zimbra%20Desktop%20Release%20Notes%207.1.4-1.pdf