By Raj Mallempati – Director, Product Marketing
Today, at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco, the VMware End-User Computing team is extremely excited to announce the launch of VMware View 4.5. This release is chock full of new features which enables customers to deploy desktop virtualization in a broad scale across the enterprise and address an increasing range of use cases.
In fact, Chris Wolf from Gartner has already declared View 4.5 as an enterprise ready desktop virtualization solution.
For those of you at VMworld, you will hear Paul Maritz and Steve Herrod detail our vision for the future of End-User Computing during the keynote. Our vision centers around the idea of delivering a consumer cloud computing experience within the enterprise while maintaining corporate policy, flexible service delivery at lower costs. You can read more about our strategy in today’s announcement.
A key first step to achieve this vision is to enable customers to modernize their existing desktop architecture so they can easily move from a more modern, user-centric model where users can access their applications and data from any device while providing IT with greater control and the ability to deliver increased efficiencies that maximize time and resources.
Here are some of the key features we have incorporated in View 4.5 to enable this vision:
Enhanced User Experience
- View Client with Local Mode – The industry’s first integrated offline and server hosted solution for desktop virtualization. End-user can check their virtual desktop out of the datacenter and work without a connection to the network efficiently and securely. Furthermore, the checked out virtual desktop will run on all existing and new PCs unlike other solutions. Additionally the checked out virtual machine is fully encrypted and has policies associated with it. This will enable organizations rapidly deploy desktop virtualization for BYOPC or EOIT (Employee Owned IT) use cases.
- Full Windows 7 support – Now with the full support for Windows 7, in View 4.5 and ThinApp 4.6, organizations can migrate to Windows 7 at half the cost and time. To further help our customers with their Windows 7 migration journey, a key new feature we are introducing in ThinApp 4.6 is the ability to virtualize IE6 and run it in Windows 7. Migrating your IE6 based applications cannot be any easier.
- View Client for Mac OS X – With View 4.5 we are further extending support for a diverse set of end user devices including Mac clients. This enables Mac users to access hosted Windows virtual desktops thereby extending the BYOPC or EOIT use cases to Mac users
Simplified and Integrated Management
- Integrated Application Assignment – Simplify the delivery of virtualized applications to end-users through the View Manager console. This integration enables ThinApp applications to be centrally managed and easily delivered to pools or individual desktops.
- Rich Graphical Dashboards – Simplify management and monitoring through improved reporting and diagnostics
- Role Based Administration – allows the distribution of IT tasks to the right administrator.
- Integration with Microsoft SCOM and PowerShell – Enable IT organizations to plug into existing management infrastructure and further simplify the management of View virtual desktops.
Best Desktop Infrastructure Platform
- Support for vSphere 4.1 and vCenter 4.1 – Deliver integration with the most widely deployed desktop virtualization platform in the industry and taking advantage of optimizations for View virtual desktops.
- Increased scalability –Customers can now deploy 10,000 virtual desktops per pod and use this modular architecture to scale out across their organization.
- Optimized Anti-virus Protection – Integration of vShield Endpoint enables the centralization of anti-virus and malware scanning to optimize virtual environment performance, simplify AV management and improve desktop security.
Lowest Acquisition Cost and Total Cost of Ownership
- Tiered storage support in View 4.5 – With the introduction of tiered storage, VMware View 4.5 helps reduce the cost of storage by enabling customers to take advantage of multiple storage tiers including high performance and locally attached storage. This helps to not only optimize performance but also allows organizations to reduce the cost associated with storage requirement for virtual desktop environments.
- Lowest Cost Reference Architectures – VMware has worked with partners such as Dell, HP, Cisco, NetApp and EMC to provide prescriptive Reference Architectures which enable customers to deploy a desktop virtualization solution that is both scalable and cost effective. For the first time in the desktop virtualization space our customers can deploy a virtual desktop solution which costs less than $500. Read more in the Reference Architecture here.
For more information on the enhancements above and the other features in the View 4.5 release be sure to check out the following:
View Point Blog: View 4.5 – Modernizing the Window's Desktop – a more technical look at the View 4.5 release
View Home Page – updated with new information related to the View 4.5 release
View Community Page – keep up with the conversations, ask questions and learn more about View 4.5
We’re also proud to be joined by our ecosystem of partners, many of whom have put out press releases today with solutions and technology that support the View 4.5 release.
General availability for the View 4.5 release is set for early September but in the meantime you’ll find a lot of information available for you to learn more about this release from the links above. You can also sign up for a free 60 day evaluation of VMware View 4.5 by going to the VMware View evaluation page and don’t forget to keep up with us on Twitter by following @vmwareview.
