VMware Horizon

VMware View 5.1 Continues to Improve User Experience

By Tony Huynh, Product Management, End-User Computing

With VMware View 5.1, VMware continues to improve the end user experience for virtual desktops across a variety of network connections and endpoints.  The View team focused on improving the experience for road warriors and users on lower end thin clients.  Additionally, significant enhancements were made to improve session interactivity and multimedia streaming for a better overall user experience – the results are smoother desktop responsiveness and a richer multimedia experience.

Robust Performance over High Latency and Lossy Networks
To provide a better user experience over WAN and Wi-Fi networks, VMware improved the performance of PCoIP over higher latency and lossy networks by up to 8X.  View 5.1 now provides better performance over WAN links with latency up to 300ms round-trip time (RTT).  Additionally, performance is now more robust in lossy network environments, with the ability to gracefully tolerate packet loss and also curtail bandwidth at higher loss rates to avoid congestion problems.


Video Playback Performance Improvements
Video playback performance was improved by up to 3X with server and client optimizations.  Higher end Windows clients are now capable of delivering hi-fidelity 1080P video.  Single-core Atom-based thin clients are now capable of playing rich 720P video.  Dual-core Arm thin clients are now able to smoothly stream 480P video.

Optimized View Client Performance
By implementing additional efficiency compression techniques to manage image cache size and reduce the client memory footprint, customers now get a dramatically improved user experience on lower end thin clients.  For example, a 1GHz ARM+WMMX client with View client 5.1 delivers almost identical performance to a 1.7GHz Atom client running View client 5.0.

5.1UE_1

Improved Interactivity
By increasing the frame rate by 2X during rapid windows drag operations and prioritizing important mouse updates, interactive responsiveness was dramatically improved – the result is more fluid operations. 

Summary
With all these enhancements in View 5.1, users can expect a better experience whether they are connecting from the office or remotely.  With more tolerance for packet loss and higher latencies, road warriors can connect with confidence and work from remote locations – such as the airport.  Additionally, improved performance for lower cost clients results in a higher price-performance for our customers.    

Read more on what's new with VMware View 5.1 or check out the VMware View webpage for more information and assets.