Today Hewlett-Packard has published a new press release about a new zero client for VMware View. The HP t310 zero client features the Teradici Tera2 zero client processor which gives you up to five times the imaging performance of the Tera1 processor. The client will be available in North America in September and it starts at $369 and varies on the hardware options.

Great news for VMware View customers and prospects. The t310 is the second PCoIP client from HP next to the PD02 which is a eVGA OEM. 

Link: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2012/120820a.html

Yesterday VMware has published the latest version (5.1.1) of VMware View.

Resolved Issues in View 5.1.1:

View Administrator

• When the number of View entities managed by one group of View Connection Server instances exceeded 10,000, View Administrator had intermittent problems displaying desktop pools, desktops, and user/group references. The intermittent display problems caused many administrative operations to fail. A View entity can be a desktop pool, desktop, or user/group reference.

View Persona Management

• View Persona Management failed to replicate a user profile that contained very large files to the remote profile repository. The incomplete replication could result in data loss or data corruption in the user profile.

User Profile Management in View

The following resolved issues concern desktop session management by View Agent and View Connection Server. In certain situations, View closed sessions prematurely, affecting user profile synchronization. In View 5.1.1, View Agent and View Connection Server wait for user profile replication to be completed before closing desktop sessions.

• When a user logged off soon after adding a large amount of data to the user profile, View shut down the View desktop before the user profile had finished being replicated to the remote profile repository. The incomplete replication could result in data loss or data corruption in the user profile. This issue is resolved when PCoIP or RDP is used.
• If a user logged off from a View desktop and immediately logged in to a new desktop session within the same pool, user profile data that was created in the new session could not be saved. The user could also lose data that was created in the previous session. This issue applied to desktops running Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, or later Windows operating system releases.

Link: https://www.vmware.com/support/view51/doc/view-511-release-notes.html

Interesting news which we got today! Teradici brings PCoIP to Microsoft Remote Desktop Services. This is what loads of people where looking for I guess. Let’s wait until VMworld US and hope that many bloggers will visit Teradici’s booth to take videos. Unfortunately I’ll not be there this year.

“Until today VMware View customers and service providers looking to combine full-featured VDI-based virtual desktops with Microsoft RDS to provide basic desktop virtualization services have had no choice but to run multiple separately managed desktop virtualization solutions with multiple remote display protocols; both of which significantly add to the cost and complexity of a comprehensive service,” said Simon Bramfitt, research analyst at Entelechy Associates. “Teradici’s entry into the RDSH market will prove attractive both to existing View customers and service providers alike as awareness of the benefits of desktop virtualization increases and organizations that had previously discounted VDI reconsider that decision. Teradici’s announcement of its RDSH solution should do much to refocus attention on the technology that has frequently been overlooked since the introduction of VDI. The increased choice it offers will do much to help customers looking to implement RDSH, especially those who do not need the comprehensive feature set and corresponding premium price of Citrix XenApp.”

For IT managers with both VMware View and Microsoft RDS session desktop environments, Teradici RDSH provides RDS session desktops with:

• PCoIP protocol support for Microsoft RDS session desktops with the benefits of industry leading performance, security, and user experience.
• The ability to broker and manage both VMware View and RDS session desktops through VMware View Manager.
• The benefits of high performing, secure, and minimal management Teradici Zero Clients for RDS session desktops. Teradici PCoIP Zero Clients are available from over 30 OEM partners in a wide variety of form factors and options.
• The ability to use the revolutionary Teradici APEX 2800 PCoIP server offload card to provide Microsoft RDS desktop sessions with the same increase in performance and scalability as currently offered in VMware View deployments.

To read the full text please visit the Teradici website.

As of this text from Teradici’s website they’re going to release the product in Q4 this year!

Teradici RDSH will be generally available in December 2012 and will be demonstrated at Teradici’s booth #917 at VMworld 2012 taking place August 26 to August 30 at the Moscone Center, San Francisco. For further information, visit www.teradici.com/RDSH

Link: http://www.teradici.com/news-and-events/press-releases/2012-08-13

VMware has posted a new evaluators guide for the fresh released VMware View version 5.1.

The content as follows:

• View Persona Management for physical User Profiles
• Customization of the View Portal for View Client Downloads
• USB Redirection
• Customer Experience Improvement Program data preview

Link: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/view/VMware-View-Evaluators-Guide.pdf

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

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 just released a new update for the enterprise desktop virtualization software VMware View. The new version which is 5.0.1 is a maintenance release and includes updates for the server, client and agent components. This maintanace release fixes a few issues which are tracked at the VMware website. (Resolved Issues)

The resolved issues are grouped as follows:

• Install and Upgrade
• View Administrator
• View Client
• Miscellaneous

Install and Upgrade

• Previously, you could not include the space character in the security server password or a trailing space at the end of the password. If the security server password contained a space, security server installation failed with the messageUnable to pair the Security Server with the specified Connection Server.

View Administrator

• Previously, on rare occasions, when you used the Add Pool wizard, the following error message appeared: “There was an error while trying to determine domains. [errorcode=3,000].” This message indicated that one of the domain objects in Active Directory was corrupted. This issue has been resolved.

View Client

• A memory leak issue associated with copying and pasting text was addressed and resolved.
• Occasionally, if you used a View desktop on multiple monitors and had some application windows open on each monitor, if the View desktop session got disconnected and then reconnected, some of the application windows would change size, position, monitor, or some combination of these. This issue has been resolved.
• Previously, on rare occasions, View Client could not connect to View Connection Server, and the client logs indicated a failure of the AcquireCredentialsHandle API, with a 0×80090305 error. This situation occurred because the message framework component of View Client failed to load the secur32.dll system DLL dynamically. This issue is now resolved by linking secur32.dll statically in Messageframework.dll.
• With regards to the virtual printing feature, occasionally, one or more printers available from your client system would not become availab le from within your View desktop. Or you would see printers listed in the View desktop that were not available to your client computer but were available from a client computer that you previously used to connect to your View desktop. This issue has been resolved.
• Previously, on Japanese systems, if you used location-based printing, in the View desktop, if you went to the Printers and Fax dialog box, clicked Preferences, and then went to the “Page Setup” and “Advanced” tabs, you would find that the text at the bottoms of these tabs was truncated. This issue has been resolved.
• Previously, when you first logged in to a checked out local desktop, the desktop would sometimes display the following error: There are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request.This issue was most likely to occur for a Windows Vista or Windows 7 guest operating system on a full virtual machine from a manual or automatic pool.

Miscellaneous

• Previously, if you opened a command prompt in a View desktop and ran the set command, the list of environment variables displayed would sometimes not include the volatile environment variables for View Client. This issue has been resolved.
• Previously, you could configure dedicated View desktops to be suspended if users had logged out but not if they had disconnected without logging out. This issue has been resolved so that you can now configure dedicated View desktops to be suspended when users disconnect. This functionality helps to conserve resources. To enable “Suspend on disconnect”:
  1. Open ADSI Edit.
  2. In the console tree, click ADSI Edit.
  3. From the Action menu, select “Connect to.”
  4. In the “Select or type a domain or server ” field, specify the server name as localhost:389.
  5. Under “Connection point,” click “Select or type a distinguished name or naming context “, and then specify the distinguished name as DC=vdi,DC=vmware,DC=int and click OK. 
     The ADAM ADSI Edit main window appears.
  6. Expand the ADAM ADSI tree, and expand OU=Properties.
  7. Select OU=Global and select CN=Common in the right pane.
  8. Select Action > Properties, and under the pae-NameValuePair attribute, add new entrysuspendOnDisconnect=1.
  9. Restart View Connection Server.

The new version also includes some new features.

• New Mac OS X Client (Release Notes)
• Client SSL requirement

Link: http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/view_501_premier_en/dCV0YndkakBidCVkKg==

Cyndie Zikmund, Technical Marketing Specialist over at VMware in Palo Alto pusblished a new article about a Zero Client strategy. This article gives you a link to a recetly pubslihed technical document which includes real life VMware View scenarios from customers who have successfully implemented a zero client strategy. A great document which help you to understand how to benefit from zero client environments. The cost less and have a smaller footprint, they’re easy to maintain and of course data security is a hot topic.

Link: VMware