VMware View Local Mode – Lessons learned
I’ve been working with VMware View Local Mode for couple of weeks now and I wanted to share my experience. VMware View Local Mode allows a virtual desktop to be downloaded to a laptop or desktop and to be executed locally. The CPU, memory, disk, network and graphics from the local desktop is being used to execute the virtual desktop. No remote display protocol is being used. VMware View Local mode is also part of the Client Side Desktop Virtualization (CSDV) Smackdown, a whitepaper which explains what CSDV is, when to use it and what the possibilities are. This whitepaper will be comparable to the VDI smackdown, only this time it will not be about server-hosted desktop virtualization, but client-hosted desktop virtualization. This whitepaper is expected to be released in Q1 of 2012. In this blogpost I will share my experience with VMware View Local mode, how it works and what doesn’t work.
How it works
The benefits of using VMware View Local Mode:
“With View Client with Local Mode, users can check out and download a View desktop to a local system such as a laptop. Administrators can manage these local View desktops by setting policies for the frequency of backups and contact with the server, access to USB devices, and permission to check in desktops.”
I assume you have a basic knowledge of the VMware View architecture. If not, here is a basic overview:
VMware View online bootcamp
VMware is organizing a nine-part VMware View Bootcamp: every day a new video is published for you to view. At the end of this bootcamp, you will have a good understanding of the VMware View solution, how to roll it out and how to optimize View in your environment. A free e-book of all the presentations is included in this bootcamp series.
“We will lock the discussions for the video each night and move on to the next video.we will show you how to get started and successfully roll out and deploy your virtual desktops and applications. We will have sessions covering everything from storage and networking best practices to PCoIP tuning and optimizing your base image. We will also touch on VMware’s new security server for PCoIP and how you can take advantage of powershell to write your own scripts for View.”
Starting July 19th, a new video will be released daily:
Design Considerations Guidelines for VMware View – Overview
- Speaker – John Dodge, Sr. Manager PSO Services, VMware
- Overview of the technical considerations to keep in mind while you’re designing a View environment
vSphere 5 for Desktops license
Just within 2 days after my blogpost about Xendesktop says goodbye to vSphere on vSphere anymore with the new license model, VMware published a document which “introduces” the vSphere 5 for Desktops license. This is the exact same license as a vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus license, only there is no vRAM limit, you’re only allowed to use it for desktop VMs and it is priced per powered on VM.
We are happy again 
What happens to the example I used before:
I need to host 500 Windows 7 desktop VMs on a cluster. Each VM needs 2 GB of vRAM. Suppose I can host 7 VMs per core and I use servers with 2 CPUs with 6 cores each. Per server I’m able to host 2*6*7= 84 VMs. Because of the memory technologies used in vSphere, I don’t need 84 x 2GB = 168GB RAM in each server, but 128GB RAM should be enough (I know, it depends, but it’s an example and pretty close to what I see in real environments). Using 6 of these servers, I’ll be able to host 504 VMs. For this calculation, let’s use 500 VMs.
XenDesktop says goodbye to vSphere? (update 2)
In a lot of VDI deployments VMware vSphere is used as the hosting platform. There a couple of reasons that you can think of about why this is:
- The company uses VMware vSphere as a platform for virtualizing their servers. They don’t want to manage other types of hypervisors for the VDI environment, so they want vSphere for their VDI as well.
- VMware vSphere has multiple memory management technologies (TPS, ballooning, Memory compression) which work extremely well in an environment where the VM’s are very similar.
- In case of VMware View, there is no choice of hypervisor, vSphere is the only option.
In case of Xendesktop deployments (or Quest vWorkspace or other VDI vendors that supports vSphere), VMware vSphere is often used because of the first two reasons. This may change this year, unless VMware takes action.
UPDATE: I’ve just learned that VMware will release a Desktop edition of vSphere 5. This is very good news!
“A vSphere Desktop edition – This was quietly added on the partner SKU list for non-View VDI implementations. This provides a low cost hypervisor for XenDesktop implementations (a fairly common occurance).” (source: Knudt Blog)
Hands-on with Ericom AccessNow for VMware View
Do you remember when you first saw Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect in action? Playing games without a controller! It looked kind of dumb at first, people standing in front of a TV making exaggerated and weird moves, but when you tried Kinect yourself for the first time, it was fun to do and it worked pretty well. However, after a while it turns out that Kinect is a 1.0 version with it’s own limitations and you’ll have to wait for a year before new games will come out that use all the capabilities of the Kinect.
This is kind of the feeling I have now about Ericom AccessNow for VMware View, the HTML5 client for VMware View. At first you think it’s probably not that good without a “real” VMware View client installed, but once you try it, you’re amazed how easy it is to setup and use it. After a short while, you’re starting to see the limitations the product still has and you’d rather wait for a next version which has more features and has a better user experience.
