Well, the legendary beta programme (that’s practically no-one I knew could get on!) is over and the product has has not GA’d. What I thought was a GA is actually an announcement… and you can register to do eval… probably in 60-days time (I’m joking actually there..)

http://www.vmware.com/products/view/features.html

Notable additions is the PCoIP (PC over IP) which will deliver a new generation of graphically rich experiences.

Address the broadest range of use cases and deployment options with VMware View’s PCoIP desktop display protocol, and deliver a high-performance desktop experience, even over high latency and low bandwidth connections. PCoIP’s adaptive technology is optimized for the delivery of virtual desktops to users on the LAN or over the WAN. VMware View gives users access to their virtual desktops over a wide variety of virtual desktop devices, without any performance degradation, anytime. They can also play rich media content, choose from any number of monitor configurations and seamlessly access locally attached peripheral devices such as scanners and mass storage.

I don’t want to be the disseminator of FUD, but it was my understanding that the bandwidth required to deliver this would be quite significant. So I think myself and many others will be out testing ASAP to do some assessment of what user experience might be like, and critically how much bandwidth will be needed at the CENTER to deliver it… It’s also my understanding (FUD?) that PCoIP is incompatible with View’s “Security Server” which means if you do want to run it across the WAN, a secondary VPN connection might be required…

Worthy of note is that Windows 7 and Offline Desktop is still marked as EXPERIMENTAL support. Sigh. I wish VMware would drop this concept of experimental. I don’t think it really has much benefit. After all other software vendors release software and then release patches – if they later discover bugs/errors/issues/features – why don’t they just take a leaf out very other ISV’s book…

VMware View Premier Bundle of the product with 3 years support includes VI Enterprise, View Manager, View Composer, ThinApp (Packager, Client, WS) and vCenter Foundation licensed for 10 desktop VMs and is priced at $4,093.75. That works out at $409 per desktop connection – so I think you’d be wanting to ramp those connections pretty quickly…

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 9:20 am and is filed under VDI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.