VMware View 5.0 GA and available for download

VMware View 5.0 Generally available

VMware View recently announced during VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas is finally GA and available for download. As you could read in my article about the release in my post which was published here on my website a couple of days ago during the event, the new Vmware View 5.0 integrates many enhancements and new features since it's previous release.

And the testing results demonstrate up to 75% bandwidth reduction when compared to previous releases of PCoIP. (LiquidWarelabs.com)

New in VMware View 5 are significant enhancements in the PCoIP® protocol that yield 75 percent bandwidth consumption reductions in both LAN and WAN deployments

View Persona Management – this is a new feature in VMware View 5.0 which permits to manage and preserve the user profiles on one central location:

“manage settings and files, policies such as access privileges, performance and various other settings, as well as suspend-on-logoff, from a central location”.

Those profiles are dynamically synchronized with a remote profile repository on file server or other. The user profile is preserved between session, so one can create a floating pool for users which in View 4.6 needed a dedicated one……

So user can move around and log in to any desktop and still sees his desktop and find his profile on place.

The login and logout times are optimized as well – During login, View down loads only the files that Windows requires, such as user registry files. Other files are copied to the View desktop when the user or an application opens them from the profile folder in the View desktop. With View Persona, during logoff, only files that were updated since the last replication are copied to the remote repository

New GPO policies…..

I quote here the VDI specialist Andre Leibovici and his blog post about it:

Group Policy Additions – The number of configurable parameters through ADM templates for Windows Group Policies has been extended to cover User Persona with Folder Redirection and PCoIP additional settings. PCoIP additional settings include options like: Configure the PCoIP session MTU, Configure the PCoIP session audio bandwidth limit, Configure clipboard redirection and Configure PCoIP client image cache size policy

Lossless Codec Improvements – ( a quote from Vroom! blog) …

With View 5.0, PCoIP debuts a major enhancement to its lossless compression codec. The improved lossless compression algorithm delivers both greater compression ratios and improved robustness. As an example, the improved algorithm delivers twice the compression of its predecessor when applied to content containing anti-aliased fonts.

If you consider the desktop belonging to the typical knowledge worker there’s frequently significant text content – text on web pages, emails, presentations and PDF documents. Accordingly, a significant proportion of the imaging data being transmitted to the client device is frequently compressed using lossless compression algorithms. As a result, View 5.0’s improved lossless compression algorithm delivers a 30% to 40% reduction in bandwidth consumption for typical knowledge worker workflows.

VMware Documentation:

Technical Resources VMware View 5.0
Download Datasheet
Buy Online
Download Trial

If you really want to learn on your own, I can only recommend an excellent VMware View Training done by Brian Knudston. It's for View 4.6, but if you need to implement this solution fast in your enterprise, this is the fastest way to learn… You can read my Review of this training here. VMware View Administration Training – My Review

View Premier comes with View Composer, ThinApp, New View Persona Management, vShield Endpoint, and View Client for Local Mode not available in the Enterprise version.