This year on December 11th, the biggest VMware event in the Netherlands will take place for the fifth time! The lineup of presenters is very good, check out the agenda, lot’s of “famous” people from the virtualization community are on the list and over 600 VMware enthousiastics will be watching them. One of the sessions I will definately be attending is the VMware View 4 session, which will be presented by Rory Clements: 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.

This week VMware will release VMware View 4, “the industry’s first purpose built solution for delivering desktops as a managed service” as VMware calls it. I don’t know about that, but at least this release is a step in the right direction. The 2 big improvements View 4 brings are the new display protocol PCoIP and support for VMware vSphere. In this blogpost, I will describe the features, the components and what’s missing. Read the rest of this entry »