Quite a bit of hype around a few releases from VMware dealing with their End User Computing portfolio. Yesterday VMware released the View plugin for vCenter Operations, Horizon Application Manager 1.5, Project Octopus was put into beta, Simbra 7.2, Socialcast, and last but certainly not least VMware View 5.1 was released as well.
And don't let the .1 fool you, this version of VMware VIew has a slew of improvements, enhancements, and new features packed into it. I will outline a few of my favorites below but be sure to head on over to the press release and check them out for yourself.
The View Storage Accelerator
This is a technology that should improve speed and performance by caching the commonly identical read blocks of your virtual desktops into a specified amount of local host memory. Keep in mind this is just for read blocks, but should be very useful when there are a number of common blocks being read such as during a scheduled anti-virus scan, boot storms, etc…
View Persona Management
New in View 5 was the built in persona management, well, View 5.1 takes that one step further and provides persona management across both virtual and physical desktops. This feature however is not meant to be something that is constantly used within the environment, but more so used to help migrate physical XP workstations to a virtual Windows 7 desktop.
USB Redirect
Again, this was available within View 5, however 5.1 has removed the need to have the physical driver installed on your end points. By utilizing some technology built into the agent and a generic USB arbitrator on the client side you should see support for a wider range of USB devices flowing in.
Once again, these are only a few choice features of View, there are many more features as well as an explanation of all the other announcements from yesterday over at the End User Computing blog or the press release. Check them all out and find out for yourself that View 5.1 is more than a .1 release. View 5.1 should be shipping sometime during Q2 of this year so stay tuned… 🙂
