When VMware launched View 5 in the fall last year, the goal was to improve the user experience. VMware View 5 improves the user experience through a number of enhancements that touched on everything from performance to management. It improves the end-user experience when employing PC over Internet Protocol (PCoIP) display compression technology by adding throttling that cuts back network usage.
View 5 also adds Persona, VMwares entry into user-profile management, a much-needed feature to keep up in the competitive virtual-desktop arena.
The improved user experience for View 5 also includes the release of View client support for Mac and Android-based devices. While these changes add functionality to View, much of the performance improvements that showed stemmed from new ways to restrict features. In particular, PCoIP bandwidth controls make it easier to smooth out View client network usage. The trade-off for this gain in responsiveness is at least a temporary decrease in image fidelity.
Installing and using View 5 is no small task. Only organisations with significant technology expertise on staff and a plan that calls for replacing traditional desktops with virtual machines hosted in the data center should consider installing View 5.
Successfully rolling out View 5 will require senior engineers with expert implementation skills in local and wide-area networking, desktop deployment, and storage, virtual and physical system management, database and Active Directory planning and managementat a minimum. On top of these technical experts, add licence analysts to thoroughly assess the VMware and end user license costs of the project. The VMware Licensing upset (tinyurl.com/7cggumt) that happened when vSphere 5 was released in the summer of 2011 doesnt significantly affect View 5 implementations. Virtual desktop infrastructure, including licensed separately from VMwares server virtualisation products when used for desktop deployments.
VMware View 5 became available in October last, and costs $150 per concurrent use for the Enterprise license or $250 per concurrent use for the Premier licence. The main difference between users is to get access to the new View Persona user profile capability.
How I Tested the Technology
I started the testing by spending a lot of time with the more than 700 pages of documentation that come with View 5. Most of the work involved in setting up a View 5 infrastructure should be figured out on paper long before the first piece of View 5 infrastructure is in place.
The heart of a View 5 deployment is the View Connection server. I installed it on a virtual machine running Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1. As required, the View Connection Server was part of my Windows Active Directory domain and was also managed by the same VMware vCenter Server as the virtual desktop systems I used in my test.
Since I also tested systems that used local (disconnected desktop) mode, I installed a special variant of the View Connection server, called a View Transfer server, on a VM that was identically configured to the specification of the View Connection standard server. The View Transfer server manages check-in/check-out and transfers files between the data center and the local desktop. Local mode hasnt changed that much since the previous version. The new Persona user profile management changes cant be used with local-mode desktops. Since these systems are usually dedicated to individual users, this limitation isnt material to most View 5 deployments.
View Composer 2.7 is an optional feature I installed on the vCenter Server because I mainly deployed linked-clone desktop pools in my test environment. View Composer uses a SQL Server (in my case) or Oracle database to store information about connections and components, including vCenter Server connections. In addition to installing the View Connection and Transfer servers, I also created Windows 7 and Windows XP virtual desktop systems and used snapshots (for linked-clone pools) and templates (for most other virtual desktop deployments) to fill out my View 5 test environment.
PCoIP
Microsoft RDP/RemoteFX, Citrix ICA/HDX and VMware/Teradici PCoIP are remote desktop technologies that try to overcome the laws of physics to make virtual desktop systems hosted in a data center appear as if they were executing locally to the end user. The changes to VMwares flavor of this partner provided technology were mainly to deal with making the protocol use more sensitive to network bandwidth constraints.
In my tests, I used Microsoft Group Policy administrative templates provided with VMware View 5 to configure how PCoIP would handle image quality, USB redirection and client-side caching to ensure smooth operation in my test environment. Overall, these changes worked as expected to provide IT managers with the ability to generally set parameters on how virtual desktop systems use network resources.
Network and desktop administrators will need to work in concert to get these settings right. For example, I was able to set the PCoIP minimum-session bandwidth-transmission rate. While this meant better responsiveness when I used my virtual desktop systems, it was possible to oversubscribe the network bandwidth available for all systems. I did this once during my tests and spent several hours troubleshooting the situation before discovering this mis-configuration on my part.
Personality
VMware View 5 Persona, available in the Premier version, let me use less costly (with smaller memory footprint and less administrative overhead) stateless linked clones and still provide personalised virtual desktop systems. This type of functionality came from third-party add-on products in the previous version of View. View 5 Persona can also be used in conjunction with Windows Roaming Profiles, although my tests employed only Persona to synchronise user-specific data and desktop settings.
Implementing View 5 Persona is a major endeavor, and current VMware View administrators will need to devote significant time to planning the rollout of this feature. I needed to create a new data repository and prepare new virtual desktop systems again using the Vmware provided templates to enable and manage the personalisation settings for my View 5 Persona desktops.
I used View 5 Persona to specify files that should be immediately downloaded when a user logged on to a virtual desktop. It was also possible to keep these files in a local file that was maintained on the users local system between desktop sessions to improve performance. This should be applied with care to ensure that sensitive data is kept under control at the data centre.
New bandwidth controls make the View 5.0 user experience snappier. The control feature for governing Adobe Flash quality and throttling were set during the virtual desktop pool-creation process.
Cameron Sturdevant is Technical Director, eWeek Labs.
When VMware launched View 5 in the fall last year, the goal was to improve the user experience. VMware View 5 improves the user experience through a number of enhancements that touched on everything from performance to management. It improves the end-user experience when employing PC over Internet Protocol (PCoIP) display compression technology by adding throttling that cuts back network usage.
View 5 also adds Persona, VMwares entry into user-profile management, a much-needed feature to keep up in the competitive virtual-desktop arena.
The improved user experience for View 5 also includes the release of View client support for Mac and Android-based devices. While these changes add functionality to View, much of the performance improvements that showed stemmed from new ways to restrict features. In particular, PCoIP bandwidth controls make it easier to smooth out View client network usage. The trade-off for this gain in responsiveness is at least a temporary decrease in image fidelity.
Installing and using View 5 is no small task. Only organisations with significant technology expertise on staff and a plan that calls for replacing traditional desktops with virtual machines hosted in the data center should consider installing View 5.
Successfully rolling out View 5 will require senior engineers with expert implementation skills in local and wide-area networking, desktop deployment, and storage, virtual and physical system management, database and Active Directory planning and managementat a minimum. On top of these technical experts, add licence analysts to thoroughly assess the VMware and end user license costs of the project. The VMware Licensing upset (tinyurl.com/7cggumt) that happened when vSphere 5 was released in the summer of 2011 doesnt significantly affect View 5 implementations. Virtual desktop infrastructure, including licensed separately from VMwares server virtualisation products when used for desktop deployments.
VMware View 5 became available in October last, and costs $150 per concurrent use for the Enterprise license or $250 per concurrent use for the Premier licence. The main difference between users is to get access to the new View Persona user profile capability.
How I Tested the Technology
I started the testing by spending a lot of time with the more than 700 pages of documentation that come with View 5. Most of the work involved in setting up a View 5 infrastructure should be figured out on paper long before the first piece of View 5 infrastructure is in place.
The heart of a View 5 deployment is the View Connection server. I installed it on a virtual machine running Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1. As required, the View Connection Server was part of my Windows Active Directory domain and was also managed by the same VMware vCenter Server as the virtual desktop systems I used in my test.
Since I also tested systems that used local (disconnected desktop) mode, I installed a special variant of the View Connection server, called a View Transfer server, on a VM that was identically configured to the specification of the View Connection standard server. The View Transfer server manages check-in/check-out and transfers files between the data center and the local desktop. Local mode hasnt changed that much since the previous version. The new Persona user profile management changes cant be used with local-mode desktops. Since these systems are usually dedicated to individual users, this limitation isnt material to most View 5 deployments.
View Composer 2.7 is an optional feature I installed on the vCenter Server because I mainly deployed linked-clone desktop pools in my test environment. View Composer uses a SQL Server (in my case) or Oracle database to store information about connections and components, including vCenter Server connections. In addition to installing the View Connection and Transfer servers, I also created Windows 7 and Windows XP virtual desktop systems and used snapshots (for linked-clone pools) and templates (for most other virtual desktop deployments) to fill out my View 5 test environment.
PCoIP
Microsoft RDP/RemoteFX, Citrix ICA/HDX and VMware/Teradici PCoIP are remote desktop technologies that try to overcome the laws of physics to make virtual desktop systems hosted in a data center appear as if they were executing locally to the end user. The changes to VMwares flavor of this partner provided technology were mainly to deal with making the protocol use more sensitive to network bandwidth constraints.
In my tests, I used Microsoft Group Policy administrative templates provided with VMware View 5 to configure how PCoIP would handle image quality, USB redirection and client-side caching to ensure smooth operation in my test environment. Overall, these changes worked as expected to provide IT managers with the ability to generally set parameters on how virtual desktop systems use network resources.
Network and desktop administrators will need to work in concert to get these settings right. For example, I was able to set the PCoIP minimum-session bandwidth-transmission rate. While this meant better responsiveness when I used my virtual desktop systems, it was possible to oversubscribe the network bandwidth available for all systems. I did this once during my tests and spent several hours troubleshooting the situation before discovering this mis-configuration on my part.
Personality
VMware View 5 Persona, available in the Premier version, let me use less costly (with smaller memory footprint and less administrative overhead) stateless linked clones and still provide personalised virtual desktop systems. This type of functionality came from third-party add-on products in the previous version of View. View 5 Persona can also be used in conjunction with Windows Roaming Profiles, although my tests employed only Persona to synchronise user-specific data and desktop settings.
Implementing View 5 Persona is a major endeavor, and current VMware View administrators will need to devote significant time to planning the rollout of this feature. I needed to create a new data repository and prepare new virtual desktop systems again using the Vmware provided templates to enable and manage the personalisation settings for my View 5 Persona desktops.
I used View 5 Persona to specify files that should be immediately downloaded when a user logged on to a virtual desktop. It was also possible to keep these files in a local file that was maintained on the users local system between desktop sessions to improve performance. This should be applied with care to ensure that sensitive data is kept under control at the data centre.
New bandwidth controls make the View 5.0 user experience snappier. The control feature for governing Adobe Flash quality and throttling were set during the virtual desktop pool-creation process.
Cameron Sturdevant, eWeek Labs Technical Director
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