There is a new version of VMware View available for download at the VMware website. The version 3.1 includes loads of new features and great improvements. VMGuru.nl already has updated to the new version and wrote about it on their blog.

Great blog post on upgrading VMware View to version 3.1 over at VMGuru.nl. Eric Scholten who is a Solution Architect writes about his experience when updating their View broker. He also talks about the improvements of the new version.

The VMware View Client delivers useful information to the VMware View Agent which can be found in the virtual desktops Windows registry. This information can be used by scripts i.e. for mapping the right network printer based on the location of the View Client device.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t actually need vCenter and ESX(i) to use View. If you want to utilize VMs from other platforms as your desktops you need to change one thing when installing the agent onto those VMs.

Make sure to start with a fresh and current image. As of this writing that is 5.1.606 revA. Load the image and confirm that the green lock in the systray comes up green after all the rebooting. If you get a red “x” do it again.

While Vista is still not completely supported in every variant with all features as of this writing in a View environment today, I have many customers running it and asking for tips on how to make it run better than it does out of the box. The following are some tips you can try AT YOUR OWN RISK. These are provided as tips and suggestions only. Some you might use and others not. This is provided as thinking and discussion points for running Vista.  Now that the disclaimer is out …

There are several reasons why you might need several GINA’s using View. Problem is it’s not well documented on how to actually chain them together and make it work. So here is a quick post on how to do that.

Running Novell eDirectory with view is problematic and not supported. However here is how you do it if you feel so inclined. I would like to thank a very good customer of mine, Carl Hooker for helping me solve this riddle in his environment.

Recently I wrote an article about the handling of client mapped drives when using VMware View. RDP supports the redirection of the clients drives which will be forwarded to the virtual client and shown as network drives. With an GPO template which is included in View or the default Active Directory policy you can control this mapping. But what if the drive is a local drive like the OS disk in a automated linked clone pool?

The hostname naming conventions in companies are very different and mostly the come from the early days of IT. In banks for example often they are using a prefix or suffix with an increasing number. With VMware View it’s possible to use naming patterns to customize the hostname. By default the prefix can be up to 13 characters in length and some numeric suffix is appended to that in order to distinguish each desktop from others in the pool.