VMware View

Overview:

VMware View 4 is the leading desktop virtualization solution built for delivering desktops as a managed service—from the platform to the protocol. This solution lets enterprise IT manage operating systems, applications and user persona independently of each other. VMware View 4 simplifies desktop management, reduces desktop operational costs and increases control for IT while providing end users with flexible access, creating a superior desktop experience for end users—over any network.

How does VMware View Work?

Today’s desktop environment links together desktop components—hardware, operating system, applications, user profile and data—in ways that are difficult to support and maintain. As a result, a problem at one layer often causes a chain reaction that can destroy the entire desktop, and make recovery of locally stored user data and settings very difficult and costly for IT organizations. VMware View uses virtualization to break the bonds between the desktop and associated OS, applications and hardware, and dynamically assembles and delivers desktops and applications to users with a personalized view of their individual desktops. By encapsulating the desktop OS, applications and user data into isolated layers, VMware View enables IT staff to change, update and deploy each component independently for greater business agility and improved response time. The result is a more flexible access model that improves security, lowers operating costs and simplifies desktop administration and management.

How is VMware View Used in the Enterprise?

Desktops as a Secure Managed Service
With VMware View 4, it’s easy to deliver cost-effective virtual desktops and applications securely from the datacenter or other centralized location to internal employees, call centers, government agencies, healthcare providers, educational facilities or offshore facilities. VMware View with PCoIP provides a superior total desktop experience to all users across any type of network, no matter where users are located. Confidential data and information is removed from the end-point device, and access is tightly controlled and managed. Strong network encryption protects data in transit, and integration with RSA SecurID enables two-factor authentication. These features can help reduce the risk of data leakage or malicious code intrusion and simplify regulatory compliance.

Desktop Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
VMware View extends the reliability, automated backup, data protection and disaster recovery abilities traditionally reserved for server applications to the desktop. Bring the power of VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus to your desktops and standardize on a single platform to manage your desktops through the datacenter to the cloud.

Remote or Branch Offices and Secure Remote Access
Deliver high-performance virtual desktops from centralized datacenters or centralized servers onsite, to remote or branch offices such as retail stores, bank branches and physician’s offices and even offshore facilities . No need to staff remote locations with IT resources, since desktop management and provisioning are done centrally and users get the benefit of a high performance personalized desktop environment even over a high-latency, low-bandwidth connection.

Windows 7 Migration
Eliminate many of the problems typically encountered during OS migrations, such as high costs, application compatibility with the new OS and lack of hardware support. Minimize the cost and disruption of migrating users and applications to Microsoft Window 7 desktops. Extend the life of existing desktop hardware to access virtual Windows PC desktops, reduce application conflicts and costly application porting and regression testing by delivering Microsoft Windows 7 as a virtual desktop with VMware View 4.

Benefits:

VMware View enables the following benefits:

• Streamlined management and control.
  VMware View Manager lets you manage all desktops centrally in the datacenter and provision desktops instantly to new users, departments or offices. Create instant clones from a central image, and create dynamic pools of desktops for quick provisioning and rapid updating.
• Lower costs.
  VMware View reduces overall costs of desktop computing by up to 50 percent by centralizing management, administration and resources and removing IT infrastructure from remote offices.
• Better security.
  Since all data is maintained within the corporate firewall, VMware View minimizes risk and data loss. Built-in SSL encryption provides secure tunneling to virtual desktops from unmanaged devices.
• Increased end-user satisfaction.
  VMware View PCoIP display protocol provides a superior end-user experience over any network. Adaptive technology ensures an optimized virtual desktop delivery on both the LAN and the WAN. Address the broadest list of use cases and deployment options with a single protocol. Access personalized virtual desktops complete with applications and end-user data and settings anywhere and anytime with VMware View.
• Improved business agility and user flexibility.
  VMware View Manager accommodates changing business needs, such as adding new desktop users or groups of users, while providing a consistent experience to every user from any network point.
• Reliable business continuity and disaster recovery.
  VMware View is built on industry-leading VMware vSphere 4 and can automate desktop backup and recovery of a business process in the datacenter.
• Reduce carbon footprint and energy costs.
  When used in conjunction with thin client devices, which typically use 1/10th the power of a traditional PC, VMware View helps reduce energy costs and reduce the carbon footprint by up to 80 percent.

Key Features and Capabilities:

Simplified Desktop Management

Desktop and application virtualization breaks the bonds between software, hardware and operating systems, eliminating the need to actually install or manage desktop environments on end user devices. From a central location you can deliver, manage and update all of your Windows desktops and applications in minutes. VMware View makes the testing, provisioning and support of applications and desktops much easier and less costly.

Automated Desktop Provisioning

Through View Manager 4, VMware View provides a single management tool to provision new desktops or groups of desktops, and an easy interface for setting desktop policies. Using a template, you can customize virtual pools of desktops and easily set policies, such as how many virtual machines can be in a pool, or logoff parameters. This feature enables greater IT efficiency by automating and centralizing desktop provisioning activities.

Advanced Virtual Desktop Image Management

Based on the mature Linked Clone technology, View Composer enables the rapid creation of desktop images from a master image. Whatever updates are implemented on the parent image can be pushed out to any number of virtual desktops in minutes, greatly simplifying deployment and patches and reducing costs. The process does not affect user settings, data or applications, so the user remains productive on a working desktop, even while the changes are being applied.

Superior End User Experience

Address the broadest range of use cases and deployment options with VMware View’s PCoIP desktop display protocol, and deliver a high-performance desktop experience, even over high latency and low bandwidth connections. PCoIP’s adaptive technology is optimized for the delivery of virtual desktops to users on the LAN or over the WAN. VMware View gives users access to their virtual desktops over a wide variety of virtual desktop devices, without any performance degradation, anytime. They can also play rich media content, choose from any number of monitor configurations and seamlessly access locally attached peripheral devices such as scanners and mass storage.

Built-in Security

Maintain control over data and intellectual property by keeping it secure in the datacenter. End users can access their personalized desktop, complete with applications and data, from any location, at any time without jeopardizing the corporate security policies. Optional integration with RSA SecurID for 2 factor authentication avialble.

Availability and Scalability

VMware View delivers high availability, with no single point of failure. VMware High Availability (HA) ensures automatic failover and provides pervasive, cost-effective protection within your virtualized desktop environment, without the cost or complexity of traditional clustering solutions. Additionally, advanced clustering capabilities on the physical and virtual layers provide enterprise-class scalability with no single point of failure.

Streamlined Application Management

VMware ThinApp application virtualization separates applications from underlying operating systems for increased compatibility and streamlined application management. Applications packaged with ThinApp can be run in the datacenter and accessible through a shortcut on the virtual desktop, reducing the size of the desktop image and subsequent storage needs. Since ThinApp isolates and virtualizes applications, multiple applications or multiple versions of the same applications run on users’ virtual desktops without conflict. Applications are managed and deployed centrally, ensuring that all users desktops are up-to-date with the latest application versions.

(Experimental) Offline Desktop

Offline Desktop, an experimental feature in VMware View 4, increases productivity by allowing you to run managed virtual desktops locally or in the datacenter through the same administration framework. Simply download a virtual desktop onto your local client device. All existing security policies for that virtual desktop continue to be applied and enforced. Later, you can check the desktop back into the datacenter for resynchronization.

(Experimental) Windows 7 Support

Reduce costs and complexity of desktop migration by delivering Windows 7 as a virtual desktop.

Thin Client Support

VMware View supports a wide variety of thin client devices

TCO:

PC hardware consumes a large portion of IT budget but the acquisition cost of PCs is only a small portion of the total cost of ownership. A typical organization spends approximately 3 dollars in operational expense for every dollar spent on PC hardware acquisition. Reduce your desktop acquisition, operating and management costs through desktop virtualization and improved desktop management. Free up your IT staff to work on strategic projects while meeting your service level agreements (SLAs). Take control of your desktop infrastructure by standardizing on the industry leading desktop virtualization solution from VMware. You’ll see immediate, quantifiable cost savings while ensuring true business agility—the ability to rapidly respond to the changing market environment.

Reduce CapEx Costs by Extending the Useful life of PC hardware

Are you coming up against a PC refresh cycle or an OS migration that requires PC hardware upgrade? What if you could by-pass the upgrade or migration cost? You can potentially double the useful life of your existing PC hardware with VMware View. That’s a CapEx saving that flows directly into your company’s bottom-line.

Reduce OpEx Costs with Better Desktop Management and Automation

Streamline desktop management, deployment, maintenance and support while improving efficiency when you automate desktop management with VMware View. A recent IDC study shows that VMware View Customers, on average, are able to save 55% on their operational expense when compared to a traditional desktop. VMware View customers are realizing significant savings in the following areas:

• Savings on Deskside service cost : 94%
• Savings Desktop Image management : 85%
• Savings on User Administration: 68%
• Savings on OS & Application patching : 65%

Minimize Potential Lost Revenue from PC Downtime

Unplanned downtime adversely affects your bottom line, your corporate perception, business relationships, and future viability. With VMware View you can minimize your productivity cost associated with downtime, image corruption, application incompatibility or denial of service. On average, VMware View customers realize a saving of 59% on productivity cost.

What’s Included in VMware View 4:

With the expanded VMware View 4 solution, companies can apply powerful tools traditionally reserved for mission-critical datacenter applications to desktop environments.

Platform

VMware vSphere 4 for Desktops

VMware vSphere serves as the platform for VMware View 4, and as a result, IT organizations can extend the benefits of industryleading virtualization to the desktop. Integrating desktop infrastructure with VMware vSphere provides unified management and a host of features that improve performance, reliability and business continuity, including:

• The ability to group servers, which host virtual desktops, together for redundancy and eliminate single point of failure..
• Consolidated Backup to centralize backup for desktop virtual machines.
• Automated failover and recovery to keep desktops running nonstop.
• Dynamic load balancing for desktop computing resources.

Management

VMware View Manager 4
VMware View Manager 4, a key component of VMware View, is an enterprise-class desktop management solution, which streamlines the management, provisioning and deployment of virtual desktops. Users securely and easily access virtual desktops through VMware View Manager, and upgrading and patching are done centrally from a single console so you can efficiently manage 100s or even 1,000s of desktops from a small image— saving time and resources. Data, information and intellectual property remain in the datacenter and never have to leave— except with your permissions and security policies intact.

VMware View Composer
A component of the VMware View solution, VMware View Composer uses VMware Linked Clone technology to rapidly create desktop images that share virtual disks with a master image to conserve disk space and streamline management. User data and settings are segmented from the desktop image, so they can be administered independently. As a result of this Linked Clone model, all desktops that are linked to a parent image can be patched or updated through VMware View Manager simply by updating the parent image, without affecting users’ settings, data or applications. This leads to a dramatic reduction in storage needs and costs while simplifying desktop management.

ThinApp 4
VMware ThinApp™ application virtualization software is an agentless solution that decouples applications from operating systems by isolating and encapsulating them into an EXE or MSI files. This technology reduces application deployment time and costs by enabling multiple versions of applications to run on a single OS without conflict, or the same version of an application to run on multiple operating systems without modification. ThinApp simplifies upgrading and patching applications and reduces storage needs for virtual desktops, because applications are hosted separately and streamed to users on-demand, with all personal settings preserved.

User Experience

VMware View with PCoIP Display Protocol
PCoIP is a high-performance display protocol—specifically built for delivering virtual desktops over the WAN or LAN for a superior end-user experience from the task worker to the designer. Play rich media content choose any number of monitor configurations including real multi monitor and seamlessly access locally attached peripherals such as printers, scanners or mass storage.

VMware View Printing
Print from virtual desktops to local devices without compatibility issues, bandwidth restraints or complicated user setup. VMware View will automatically discover, connect and print from a virtual desktop to any local or networked printer that’s defined on the client device. Universal print drivers eliminate compatibility issues. Virtual Printing includes compression to deliver highquality printing with enhanced performance, even over suboptimal network connections.

VMware View Display
Optimize delivery of graphics to the variety of monitor configurations, ranging from a single display to multiple display options. With support for up to four monitors, VMware View Display delivers multi-monitor by sending the appropriate ‘slice’ of the display output to each monitor. In addition, VMware View provides support for monitor pivot by enabling one or more of the monitors in a dual monitor configuration to be pivoted.

VMware View Multimedia
Ensure the best user experience of rich audio and video. Multimedia streams are rendered at the client leveraging local resources and delivering the best possible user experience for rich audio and video content. With multimedia content being rendered at the client, dependencies on the server hosting the virtual desktop are reduced therefore allowing for better performance and scalability of the server infrastructure.

VMware View Direct
Give users access to devices attached to their local client. This includes devices such as USB mice, scanners, printers, storage devices. Seamless mapping to client attached peripherals minimizes training of end users in a VMware View environment while minimizing impact to IT

(Experimental) Offline Desktop
Offline Desktop for experimental use allows complete virtual desktops to be moved between the datacenter and physical desktop devices with security policies intact. Changes are intelligently synchronized between datacenter and physical desktop devices. Offline Desktop allows a user to run their virtual desktop offline or simply take advantage of local resources for the best virtual desktop user experience available.

Technical Specifications:

 

How to Buy:

VMware View is sold in two editions—Enterprise and Premier—as a bundled solution that includes VMware vSphere and vCenter for Desktops, or as a desktop add-on to a separate or existing VMware vSphere purchase. VMware View Enterprise offers the next release of VMware View Manager 4, an enterprise desktop manager. VMware View Premier includes additional components to substantially lower the costs of managing applications and desktops, while increasing business agility.

See below for packaging options based on whether you are a new customer, existing VMware Infrastructure customer, or have previously purchased VMware VDI and want to upgrade to VMware View Premier. Note that all bundles and add-ons come in 10 and 100 quantity packs.

For New Customers

VMware View Editions Compared

 

For Existing VMware vSphere Customers — Add Desktops

VMware View Add-ons Compared

Note: You cannot mix bundles and Add-ons.

For Existing VMware View Enterprise Customers — Upgrade to Premier

VMware View Premiere Upgrade

(¹) Offline Desktop is experimental in VMware View 4.

Documentation:

VMware View Data Sheet (.PDF)