by David Young – Sr. System Engineer
As was noted in a recent blog about the federal market, every VMware View deployment starts with the use case. The first thing I usually ask is “What am I trying to fix?” Once I know what I am trying to fix I can then work towards delivering the right solution for the customer.
With that said, as I talked to Federal customers, I was seeing few important features come up that were needed in order to address the use cases common across this space. VMware recently announced the GA release of View 4.5 which, in particular, was of great importance to the Federal customer base as it introduced features that directly addressed use cases within the Federal Government and specifically for DOD environments. These features include:
SmartCard support (better known as CAC and PIV) for the PCoIP display protocol – With the introduction of SmartCard integration with the PCoIP display protocol Federal IT teams will be able to leverage the VMware View infrastructure to address use cases such as Teleworking, Multi Security Environments, Kiosk deployments and most importantly the implementation of Zero Clients.
FIPS 140-2 Certification of the PCoIP protocol – With the View 4.5 release VMware made a commitment to certify the protocol with FIPS validated crypto modules. VMware has submitted our package to be certified which goes a long way to show the dedication of VMware and the View solution in the Federal market.
View Client with Local Mode & CAC support – This allows agencies to use View managed desktops in a distributed environment, leveraging local compute resources while giving users the ability to access their desktop even without a network connection. Local Mode gives users the ability to move their virtual machine from the data center to the local endpoint device so that they can work even while offline (like when they're traveling or on an airplane). the desktop image is completely encrypted and secure and IT can extend policy to the desktop even while offline. This provides security assurance for IT while enabling flexibility to end-users.
With these enhancements in the View 4.5 release you can see that VMware is dedicated to delivering capabilities and solutions targeted at Federal use cases (among others). I think the real proof is in the customer interest that we're seeing now that View 4.5 is out and available. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the features mentioned above, the others in View 4.5 and how they're helping you to address use cases in your organization.
