Hot off the presses from VMware Press is a new free book excerpt from VMware Horizon Suite – Building End User Services: 
The Evolution of the End User
VMware’s product line has rapidly evolved to become a more complete end-user suite. VMware acquired Wanova and its flagship product Mirage. The founders of Wanova had extensive experience in wide-area networking (WAN) and had already developed and sold a WAN services company, Actona, which was acquired by Cisco. The experience in WAN optimization was the basis of the company name Wanova.
Mirage was designed to centralize a nd optimize desktops by providing layered image management over both local-area network (LAN) and WAN links. Endpoints are synced to a centralized virtual desktop (CVD) in the datacenter. The CVD is built using OS and application layers, in addition to a driver library that can be managed and changed. Any changes are synchronized back to the endpoint, enabling centralized management without sacrificing the decentralized execution of a traditional desktop environment.
VMware View, VMware’s vSphere-based virtual desktop solution, provides online and offline access to desktops in the datacenter. Users can connect to virtual desktops running in the datacenter from various types of View clients. If the virtual desktop needs to be run in a disconnected/offline mode, users running Windows clients can check out the virtual machine (VM) so that it runs as a local mode desktop; changes to the desktop are synchronized
to the datacenter when they reconnect. Unlike local mode desktops, Mirage does not make use of a hypervisor as it runs as an agent on a traditional XP or Windows 7 operating system. VMware announced that View would be part of the Horizon Suite, which thus consists of VMware View, VMware Mirage, and VMware Workspace.
Grab your copy of the excerpt here.
