VMware recently announced the availability of vCenter Operations for Horizon View 1.5. The vCenter Operations for Horizon View solution is a great tool to gain comprehensive visibility into your VDI’s infrastructure health, applications and performance.

Image source: operations_dashboard_800x600.jpg

- providing automated desktop operations capabilities; with Horizon View 5.2-near-equivalent scalability (8K concurrent users), for large-scale, multi-pod and multi-data center Horizon View deployments!

- auto-installing the data collection agents in the new vC Ops Mgr 1.5 architecture with View 5.2 installation, minimizing deployment and administrative effort. (The agent can be manually deployed to 5.0/5.1 installations as well.) – providing configurable metric sets for further scalability options

- delivering pre-configured “super-metrics” for functionality such as current/max concurrent user counts for license compliance

- enhancing the View Adapter dashboard, and additional self-health features to ensure proper functioning of vC Ops Mgr for View itself – providing enhanced User Interface features for improved product navigation and problem-solving

Installation guide: PDF Download | Administration guide: PDF Download

Product documentation: http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vcops-view-pubs.html

Download link: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_vcenter_operations_manager_for_view/1_5

VMware View 5.2 is now available for download! Here are the release notes:

What’s New in Horizon View 5.2

VMware Horizon View 5.2 delivers valuable enhancements to end user experience and ease of management, while further driving down the total cost of ownership for VDI.

What’s New with End User Experience

• Support for Windows 8 based desktops¹
• Hardware Accelerated 3D Graphics¹
• Improved video and VOIP communications with Microsoft Lync 2013 support⁴
• Streamlined access to View Desktops from Horizon²
• Easily connect to desktops from any device with HTML Access³
• Enhanced productivity from mobile devices with new ‘Unity Touch’ functionality^{3 and 4}

What’s New with Ease of Management

• Large pool creation with elimination of 8 host limits, and multiple vLAN support
• View Administrator performance improvements with large numbers of desktops
• Accelerated provisioning and recompose operations.
• Tech Preview of a new Integrated Service Console in the vSphere Web Client¹
• Support for vCenter Server Virtual Appliance based deployments

What’s New with Total Cost of Ownership

• Substantial storage capacity savings for persistent desktops with space-efficient (SE sparse) disk technology¹

¹ Requires use of vSphere 5.1 and subsequent patches
² Requires use of VMware Horizon Suite
³ Requires use of additional VMware Horizon View 5.2 Feature Pack
⁴ Requires use of latest VMware Horizon View Clients

Link: https://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/view_pubs.html

Altlantis Computing has released version 4.0 of there ILIO Persistent VDI solution. This was announced today at VMware’s Partner Exchange Conference in Las Vegas. These are the new features.

•In-Memory VDI – Unlike traditional storage, ILIO In-Memory storage decouples desktop performance from the traditional limitations of disk-based storage by running all sessions directly on server RAM – as primary storage –  to provide unparalleled desktop performance including 12 second boot time, near-instant application launches and desktop search results that appear immediately. In addition, because all desktops run on RAM, the amount of storage traffic sent on the network is drastically reduced, addressing one of VDI’s key deployment risks.
•Atlantis ILIO Fast Replication technology maintains a real-time optimized backup on shared SAN/NAS storage to preserve the state of all persistent virtual desktops to deliver data protection and recovery.
•Automated Deployment – Atlantis ILIO Center, the management system for Atlantis ILIO software, provides push-button automated installation, configuration, sizing and datastore creation for thousands of virtual desktops across multiple racks of servers. Atlantis ILIO virtual machines are automatically created and registered as NFS data stores that are ready to use by Citrix XenDesktop or VMware View provisioning tools, or by Atlantis ILIO Fast Clone, to complete the desktop provisioning process.
•Atlantis ILIO Fast Clone – Atlantis ILIO Fast Clone can create new full clones of persistent virtual desktops in as little as 5 seconds per desktop. Unlike other storage cloning, Atlantis ILIO Fast Clone creates new virtual desktops without generating storage traffic.
Atlantis ILIO Technology

Atlantis ILIO software uses patent-pending context-aware storage optimization technologies including: 
•Analysing & Processing of Storage IO Traffic – Atlantis ILIO performs context-aware processing of IO operations in real-time at the NTFS file system and block levels to significantly reduce the amount of traffic sent to storage.
•Inline Deduplication – Atlantis ILIO performs “on the wire” inline deduplication in real-time, eliminating up to 95% of the blocks before reaching storage. 
•Compression – Atlantis ILIO compresses the optimized blocks before writing them to memory.
•Coalescing (IO Blender Fix) – Atlantis ILIO converts all small random blocks generated by the Windows operating systems and hypervisor – often referred to as the IO blender affect – into larger sequential blocks, greatly improving efficiency.

If you want to learn more about the new release please visit the Atlantis website.

Links: http://www.atlantiscomputing.com/index.php?id=pr_20130226

The companies are currently showcasing simplified and cost-effective approaches for deploying VDI environments at VMware Partner Exchange 2013.

AUSTIN, Texas, Feb 26, 2013 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Pivot3, a leading provider of converged storage and compute appliances, today announced a partnership with Teradici, the developer of the PC-over-IP(R) (PCoIP(R)) protocol, to further drive exceptional end-user experiences within VDI environments. With joint customers across a wide array of industries in both the U.S. and EMEA, Pivot3 and Teradici have helped provide organizations with cost-effective solutions that boost end-user experience across the board. Through the partnership, both companies will work together on co-marketing initiatives and potential bundle programs addressing key vertical markets where VDI is a perfect IT solution.

Link: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/pivot3-and-teradici-join-forces-to-deliver-high-performance-vdi-solutions-2013-02-26

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

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