VMTN Blog

VMware View 3 was just released. (press release, product page).

VMware's Rick Westrate starts us off with a good tour. Link: A New “View” of Virtual Desktop Computing | Virtual Insanity.

Rather than just reprint the marketing press releases, I thought I would highlight some of the key new features of View3, give a short explanation, and add some initial thoughts. As the (borrowed) graphic below shows, “View3” really is the umbrella name that covers all the components of the total solution. View Manager 3 is the desktop broker that sets up and manages connections between end users and back-end desktop virtual machines. Let’s dig into some of these features.

Dave Stiles likes what he's seen so far. Link: Virtually Dave » Welcome to the View from VMware’s perspective.

Many of our customers who have been thinking about desktop virtualization or who are current VMware VDM 2.X users are going to find the new feature set substantially enhances their experience. ... VMware View when coupled with VMware ThinApp truly enables the compute on demand desktop experience many of us have heard about for so long. ...

Secondly and more importantly, the ability to build and reference off a single master image with linked clones is going to save a lot of time in deployment, management, and disk space costs.  ...

Third, View is really a multi-purpose front-end load balancer.  No longer is View just the connection broker for virtual machines, it can be the front end for Terminal Servers and PCs.  This is a big enhancement, many of our customers are going to like.  The ability to use the SSL tunneling provided for under VDM and continued in view is really going to be a full on security solution for remote office workers.

And last but not least, the feature I have been longing for the most, offline desktop. ...

Brian Madden also gives us his "60 second overview". Link: VMware releases their new VDI product, View 3. Here's a 60-second overview - Brian Madden - BrianMadden.com. He notes these advantages over Citrix, although he rightly points out that VMware hasn't yet delivered on all that we previewed at VMworld 2008.

• A lot (a mean a whole lot, like 75%) of customers who use Citrix XenDesktop run it on VMware's infrastructure. If that's the case, then VMware is a much cheaper solution, at only $150 for the edition of View 3 that includes everything.
• VMware's extensions to RDP, plus the ThinPrint stuff they've licensed, means that Citrix does not have as much as an advantage with ICA anymore.