A few days ago VMware announced the new vFast Track Reference Architecture. With several storage appliance vendors they’ve designed a cost-effective and scalable solution for VDI deployments. Yesterday VMware and Cisco announced a new joint bundling of there solution called Cisco UCS SmartPlay with VMware Horizon View. 

New Discounted Bundles

The Cisco UCS and Horizon View SmartPlay bundle is a convenient single-SKU that combines Cisco UCS and VMware Horizon in an attractively discounted bundle. This SmartPlay Starter Configuration includes:

• (2) UCS 6248UP Fabric Interconnects
• (1) UCS Chassis w/ two 2208 FEX
• (1) UCS B200 M3 Management Blade
• (3) UCS B200 M3 Desktop Workload Blades
• (300) View licenses

Expansion Bundles for additional users, and upgrade options for server-based storage are also available.

To read the full article, please visit the VMware blog.

Link: http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2013/02/accelerating-vdi-with-cisco-ucs-and-vmware-horizon-view.html

Mike Laverick has published a cool article on his blog www.mikelaverick.com about load balancing a VMware View environment with vCNS Edge Gateway. Again a great publishing! Check it if you want to learn from a pro.

Link: http://www.mikelaverick.com/2013/02/part-57-my-vcloud-journey-edge-gateway-load-balancing-vmware-view/

Thanks to Duncan Epping for bringing this whitepaper up.

“This case study provides insight and information on how to increase availability and recoverability of a VMware View infrastructure using VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM), common disaster recovery (DR)
tools and methodologies, and vSphere High Availability.”

Via: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2013/02/24/vmware-view-infrastructure-resiliency-whitepaper-published/

Direct Link: http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10348

Nice whitepaper by VMware explaining why to choose VMware View over Microsoft RDS 2012. You can directly access the whitepaper using the link below.

 Link: http://3url.de/cxq

Great news on myvirtualcloud.net. Andre has published a new article on his blog talking about a new tool which can manage VMware View pools. This is just a sneak peek. His aim is to release the tools as a Fling, but this must be approved first be the VMware Fling committee.

This tool allow administrators to bind an Active Directory connection and specify:

* How many users there should exist per group (based on VMware View pool size) 
* Floating or Persistent deployment 
* Source Security Groups (all users to be distributed to pools) 
* Destination Security Groups (All groups the users may be assigned to)

Technicalities: Floating deployment does not take in consideration if user has a persistent desktop. Persistent deployment ensures users are kept within the same security group and desktop pool they have previously been assigned to.

Image source: http://myvirtualcloud.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/1.png

Link: http://myvirtualcloud.net/?p=4530

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsrNNlRRgUw&feature=youtube_gdata

Great article on configuring location based printing for VMware View desktops on the VMFOCUS blog. Check Craig’s article if you want to learn more about ThinPrint, Printer Drivers and how to setup the printing in VMware View.

Link: http://vmfocus.com/2013/01/23/vmware-view-objective-2-9-configure-remote-andor-location-based-printing-for-view-desktops/

I’m sorry I missed to blog about this topic back in December 2012. Here we go!

That’s what Tony Huynh, Sr. Product Manager at VMware says:

VMware is excited to announce that as part of the Avaya R1 Release, Avaya has added support for rich Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) using Avaya one-X communicator with VMware View desktops.

To enable enterprise-grade UC with Avaya one-X communicator on VDI desktops, Avaya implemented a new plugin that performs media signaling and media processing  – Avaya VDI communicator.  Avaya VDI communicator runs on the client endpoint and offloads all the media processing of VoIP packets from the datacenter server to the endpoint.  When Avaya VDI communicator is deployed with VMware View, customers get a highly scalable VDI and UC solution, with point-to-point media delivery and quality-of-service (QoS) support for VoIP.  Customers also get the added benefit of business continuity with Avaya VDI communicator – if IP connectivity to the datacenter is lost or the datacenter server goes down, a local “Session Down UI” acts as a local softphone and allows calls to be placed and received.

For more information, please refer to the links below:

VMware View – http://www.vmware.com/products/view/overview.html

Avaya VDI Communicator – http://www.avaya.com/usa/product/vdi-communicator

Avaya VDI Communicator Datasheet – http://www.avaya.com/usa/resource/assets/factsheet/vdicommunicator.pdf

Avaya one-X Communicator – http://www.avaya.com/usa/product/avaya-one-x-communicator

VMware End User Computing Marketing has published an interesting article today on their VMware EUC blog. They give you their Top 5 predictions for Unified Computing with VDI.

Here you go:

1. Tablets will become a primary way to communicate by voice
2. Video communication in business will hit the mainstream
3. Virtualized contact centers takeoff
4. The need for desktop and communications availability will come to the forefront
5. Device proliferation will continue unabated

Please visit the VMware blog for the details.

Link: http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2013/01/top-5-predictions-for-2013-uc-with-vdi.html