VMware moves VDI forward with the launch of View 3

On Tuesday, VMware launched the latest version of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) suite, once known as Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM), now being called VMware View. The new product adds features and tools to help better manage physical and virtual clients, storage, and enterprise applications.

The release demonstrates VMware’s commitment to desktop virtualization in 2009. During September at VMworld 2008, VMware President and CEO Paul Maritz announced the company’s new desktop initiative and dubbed it VMware vClient saying that it would solve the “desktop dilemma.” The vClient initiative is part of several new product offerings to help VMware keep control of the virtual datacenter.

As described by Maritz, businesses’ desktop dilemma is the choice of whether to provide thick or thin clients for employees. Thick clients, or fully loaded PCs, give employees a rich set of applications in their desktop environment but are a management nightmare because applications must be distributed across thousands of PCs that need provisioning, updating, patching, and securing individually. Thin clients are cheaper, more secure, and more cost-effective to manage but traditionally have not been able to deliver the richness, flexibility, or compatibility of a thick client. Most businesses provide thin clients only for employees such as call center staff who can be productive in a more stripped-down environment. VMware View 3 solves this dilemma by combining the benefits of both approaches -– delivering rich, personalized virtual desktops to any device (whether thick or thin) while simplifying management and securing endpoints with virtual desktops hosted in the datacenter.

While VMware is currently the leader in the x86 virtualization market, they face a serious threat from competitors such as Microsoft and Citrix. So rather than focus solely on a maturing server virtualization market, VMware is going after the desktop market. And with VMware View, VMware is now going after Citrix and its XenDesktop and XenApp products.

The main component of VMware View is its connection broker, the part that was formerly called VDM. And it also packages in another one of VMware’s recent product releases, ThinApp, the company’s application virtualization technology. The product also adds a number of other new components and technologies, making it much more robust and interesting.

View Composer, one of those new components, will help better manage storage resources with its Linked Clone technology. With Linked Clones, a virtual administrator can create one master desktop image and then share that image and its OS resources in a one-to-many relationship with its cloned images, saving data resources since each desktop image no longer needs its own base operating system image. VMware claims that doing this can help cut up to 70 percent of the storage space needed to support the environment. As storage costs go up and virtual machine sprawl continues, this could prove to be a huge cost savings in itself.

Andi Mann, Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates, said, “The Linked Clones is an excellent additional feature — certainly a new approach that promises to be very effective in reducing the massive storage headache that desktop virtualization is going to bring. It will be interesting to see how much more (or less) effective it is that the Citrix approach to image management, but in any case was a critical move forward in addressing a key scalability barrier for desktop virtualization deployments.”

A major feature that people have been looking for is the notion of offline capabilities. VMware introduces Offline Desktop, an experimental feature that provides the flexibility to intelligently and securely move virtual desktops between the datacenter and a local laptop or desktop. Users can “check out” a virtual desktop onto an ordinary PC, such as a laptop, run the virtual desktop locally and then check it back in to the datacenter.

And VMware has added something called Unified Access, which provides desktop administrators with a single management platform for multiple types of sessions. It can connect to desktop environments hosted on VMware Infrastructure or user sessions running on Windows Terminal Servers or even physical PCs such as a blade PC. This gives individuals a single point of access to connect to their desktop environment, while giving administrators a single point of administration.

In addition to these improvements, VMware is also working with a number of companies to improve the user interface and desktop experience via remoting technologies. View introduces a few new RDP enhancements thanks to the collaboration with Wyse Technologies. However, what is missing is the collaboration work being done with Teradici, a company that is creating what it calls “PC Over IP” technology. This is expected to far out-perform RDP remoting, and therefore help with the performance and perceived value of desktop virtualization to the end user.

“The expanded support for broader use cases is really important strategically,” said Mann. “Supporting multiple delivery options for the virtual desktops — using a VM in a shared host, sharing a single VM using Terminal Services-based desktops, and remote delivery of dedicated blade or server-based desktops — opens up VMware’s desktop virtualization opportunity to become a much broader initiative for its customers.”

VMware View 3 comes in an Enterprise Edition and a Premier Edition. The Enterprise Edition includes VMware Infrastructure Enterprise Edition, VMware View Manager 3 and Unified Access, and it costs $150 per concurrent user for a perpetual user license. The Premier Edition includes those same products but adds VMware View Manager 3, VMware ThinApp, VMware View Composer, and Offline Desktop. And it costs $250 per concurrent user for a perpetual license.

Mann said that overall, the way VMware has expanded the applicable use cases with these additions really makes this much more viable as a strategic (enterprisewide) deployment, not just for tactical (departmental) deployments.

And he summed it up best by saying that it is hard to ignore that some of what VMware is doing is a “catch up” to competitors, but there are also a number of unique implementations, and new ways to deliver capability, that are really worth getting excited about.