Release: VMware View 5.1

Today VMware disclosed the new features of VMware View 5.1, its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure platform. This version is the follow up of version 5 which was released in August 2011.

The most important features can be summarized as follows:

  • View Storage Accelerator, already announced for View 5.0 and lifted at the last moment, this feature is borrowed from vSphere’s Content Based Read Cache (CBRC) and basically caches frequently used disk blocks into VDI host’s RAM avoiding frequent reading of the same informations from central storage.
  • View Persona Management is now extended to physical machine with the main purpose of VDI migrations or OSes migrations.
  • vCenter Operations (vCOPs) Manager for View is a new version, optimized for virtual desktop deployment, that provides end-to-end realtime monitoring of desktop and users. Already announced at VMworld Europe last year now includes a very requested feature: the ability to monitor PCoIP performance. This new release could help companies to use a single management stack for both private clouds/infrastructures and VDI.

We also wish to report an important consideration by Brian Madden:

.. the biggest thing we recently learned from VMware (thanks to Vittorio) is that they are planning (in the future) to deliver single remote Windows applications via PCoIP, and they will also deliver complete remote Windows desktops via HTML5. That’s huge. Right now you can only connect to a complete remote Windows desktop via PCoIP. VMware demonstrated technology they’re calling “AppBlast” which delivers single applications via a browser, but that was HTML5 only. So basically in the future we’ll be able to connect to single remote Windows apps via PCoIP or HTML5, and complete remote desktops via PCoIP or HTML5.