Wrroooom… View 4.5 hits the street
We have been waiting for a long time but now it’s here: VMware View 4.5 was announced today and it’s coming with loads of new stuff. I can’t write in detail about all new features in one article so I’ve decided to give you an overview of the enhancements and the new UI first and then publish several articles on the specific topics. I’ll go in details as soon as the product is availabe.
Here’s the overview:
- Windows 7 Support 32/64-Bit
- Smart Card Support for PCoIP
- Local Mode Desktop
- A native Mac Client
- Kiosk Mode
- Automated USB Redirection
- Location based printing
- Client localization (German, Japanese, French, Simple Chinese)
- Adobe Flex UI Administrator interface
- Higher broker scalability
- Role based delegation
- SysPrep support for Linked Clone desktop pools
- Persistent disk management
- Tiered storage support
- Refresh, Recompose and storage rebalance for non-persistent pools
- Semi-automatic pools
- Extensibility with Powershell, SCOM and SDK’s, Event database
- System Dashboard, User diagnostics and troubleshooting
- ThinApp entitlement
- Smart Card revocation
- Support for vSphere and vCenter version 4.1
The most noticable change with View 4.5 is the new View Administrator interface which is based on Adobe Flex UI. A rich internet application, executable on Windows, Linux, Mac and every other device supporting Adobe Flash. The new View Administrator is incredibly fast, compared to the old version which was based on HTML. It’s required that you’ve installed Adobe Flash 10.0 or higher on your client to work with the new administration console.
After logging into the View Administrator you’ll be surprised about the speed of the new console. In the top-left area you’ll see two arrows which help you to navigate forward and backward in the console. The are below that gives you an quick overview of the system status. It includes information about the current online and offline sessions, issues with desktops, events and the system health. With the new menu on the left hand side you can directly access all broker functions and the configuration options. I’ll go in detail about that in further articles.
The middle-right area of the screen shows the content for each functionality. A really cool enhancement is the Dashboard. It gives you information about the system status, warnings and potential errors. Every related component is shown in the Dashboard and can be selected for more detailed information. The ESX hosts option for example gives you details about the software version running on the host, the cluster, vCenter and also how many desktops are running on the ESX box. But there is more useful information about the vCenter, Connection servers, storage and also the desktops which are running or currently in preparation.
Following to this article I’ll write more in detail about all features mentioned above starting today with a post about the new event database integration.
Also check the original VMware posting at: http://blogs.vmware.com/view/2010/08/modernizing-the-desktop-architecture-with-vmware-view-45.html and Scott Davis article at the View Point blog: http://blogs.vmware.com/view-point/2010/08/view-45-modernizing-the-windows-desktop.html
