As I was playing around with XenDesktop 4, I had some trouble connecting the Citrix Desktop Delivery Controller to the vCenter server. And as 95% of Xendesktop deployments are on VMware VI or vSphere, I thought this tip could be useful for you as wel. Read the rest of this entry »

VMware View 4 was released nearly 2 weeks ago and I thought it could be useful to sum up all the interesting links for VMware View 4. I might add some more links the in the next couple of weeks, but I think this is a good start. Please comment if you have another good link.

Blogposts:

• VMware View 4.0 with PCoIP Released (Virtualized reality)
• VMware View 4 – Overview (Techhead)
• VMware View 4 Screenshots (VMetc.com)
• VMware View 4 Now Available. Overview of Features, PCoIP, and Architecture
• VMware View and PCoIP (Mike Laverick)
• VMware View 4 Launch Event (NTPro.nl) Read the rest of this entry »

Citrix last week released their Virtual Desktop product named Citrix XenDesktop 4. For Citrix it is the 3rd (have you ever seen 1.0 ?) generation of their VDI product. As part of the VDI Blog Battle. I’ll be using this post to update you on the architecture and basic info concerning Citrix XenDesktop 4.

What is Citrix XenDesktop ?

In my previous post, and in Svens previous post we already explained what VDI is so I’ll skip that part.

Citrix announced XenDesktop 4 like this:

“A groundbreaking new product that makes virtual desktops a mainstream reality for hundreds of millions of corporate users for the first time ever.”

Read the rest of this entry »

VMware released a KB article about best practices for upgrading to VMware View 4. This article gives a nice compatibility matrix of which components of View 4 are compatible with components of View 3. As you can see, View agent 3.x is compatible with Connection server 4.0 and View agent 4.0 is compatible with Connection server 3.x. View Client 4.0 is compatible with Connection server 3.x and View Client 3.x is compatible with Connection server 4.0. So it doesn’t really matter if you update the clients, the agents or the server first. Just be careful if you use the View composer component: Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, finally we can all find out ourselves if PCoIP is really as good as they say: View 4 is available for download!

Here is all the information you need to get you started:

First, you need to upgrade your Virtual environment to one of the following:

• VMware vSphere 4 Update 1. Update 1 is required (this update was released this week and includes VMware View 4.0, Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 support. Windows 7 is still a “technical preview” feature in View 4).
• VMware Infrastructure 3.5. Update 3 or Update 4 is recommended. Update 5 is not supported.

Read the release notes of VMware View 4 and the View 4 Admin guide.

Install the View connection server, install a guest OS in a virtual machine (Windows 7 for example ), install the View Agent into the guest OS, add the guest OS to the View Manager and you are ready to experience the new software PCoIP display protocol. Just install the View client and connect to the View manager server. Well, at least that’s what I’m doing now.