By Tony Huynh, senior product manager, End-User Computing, VMware
With VMware View 5, VMware is bringing to market the first truly scalable Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution that is capable of supporting Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Video Telephony. VMware took a collaborative approach and partnered with leading Unified Communications (UC) vendors to deliver an integrated workspace solution with rich voice and video communications which will be enabled inside View 5 desktops.
Prior to VMware View 5, host side rendering of real-time VoIP/Video media resulted in increased loads on the server and reduced VM-to-Server consolidation ratio. Other problems, such as media hair pinning, heavy bandwidth usage and lack of Quality-of-Service (QoS) were the direct result of the VoIP/Video traffic being transmitted within the display protocol.
Imagine you are making a trip from Boston to New York – the most appropriate path would be a direct path. However, what if you were forced to go from Boston to San Francisco (your datacenter) and then back to New York. This would not only increase your mileage, but also double the time it takes you to complete the trip – the hair pinning problem is very similar. To make matters worse, the problem is compounded for remote branch deployments, where the media hair pinning overloads the wide area network (WAN) links.
In View 5, VMware and our UC partners solved the previous problems that prevented support of VoIP and video telephony inside hosted virtual desktops (HVD). By adopting VMware’s UC APIs, our UC partners were able to separate out the components of a softphone application and move media processing down to the client devices. By doing so, UC providers are now able to separate the VoIP/Video traffic outside of the display protocol. The benefits of separating the VoIP/Video media include: increased server scalability, granular QoS control for real-time traffic, decreased bandwidth usage, and direct media delivery with no hair pinning of media.
Customers can now deploy UC applications inside View 5 desktops and collaborate with confidence, without having to make sacrifices for scalability and user experience. This new solution increases deployment flexibility and extends the benefits of business continuity and improved agility to both virtual desktops and UC solutions.
Read the VMware View 5 Media Backgrounder here. Screen Shots of View 5 can be found here.
