I had a great time talking to Mike Laverick (@Mike_Laverick) in a Miniwag about Healthcare Desktops at VMworld about the challenges of virtual desktops in the healthcare environment.
VMware View 5: A Good Enough Sequel
August 30, 2011 by Leave a Comment
Here comes View 5, in the rich tradition of other sequels that make it to the fifth iteration.
The common thing about all of these 5′s is they are all good enough popcorn movies. You’re not really expecting any great surprises and kind of know what you’re getting.
Now that View 5.0 is official, I can divulge that I was in the View 5 beta program. I really wasn’t blown away by new features or functionality. However, I understand that it makes sense to match vSphere 5 and SRM 5, which really are a full version updates with new useful features. There are some new things in View 5, but mostly it feels pretty familiar. Just open a soft drink to wash it down while you’re letting it install.
VMware knows View 5 just has to be good enough – not great. As long as VMware dominates the virtualized server infrastructure, the competition is going to have to offer an incredibly simple-to-use alternative. It is not unusual that companies put View and XenDesktop versus each other in proofs of concepts, but they often decide to go with View because it is good enough, and they already feel like they know the VMware stack.
View 5 shows VMware’s has grown into the company that seems to be taking the Microsoft approach when it comes to virtual desktops. There is no need to be too cutting-edge or inventive. They just need to focus on the features that are absolutely necessary to keep the series going. They have enough to focus on with all the challenges to get the cloud infrastructure and management tools ready.
I guess this is why Paul Maritz spent all of 15 seconds in the VMworld keynote announcing that View 5 is released. No need to get very excited about a product with a built-in audience that will use it because it is good enough.
Citrix Announces 3D Capabilities in XenDesktop: 10x Less Bandwidth
I recently spoke with Calvin Hsu from Citrix regarding the new capabilites they are including in the Enterprise and Platinum versions of XenDesktop. Citrix HDX is the blanket name for a suite of protocol enhancements that are focused to improve the end user experience of graphically intense applications on XenDesktop.
If you haven’t tested virtual desktops yet, they are a great solution and work really well to a targeted subset of the normal enterprise end user population. Task-based workers and users with little or no graphically intense applications are prime candidates for desktop virtualization, but users that do require more graphics, to this point, haven’t been good desktop virtualization candidates.
I tested the beta of HDX when it first came out, and it does improve the graphical experience appreciably. I could actually watch YouTube videos on XenDesktop.
10 Times Less Bandwidth
Citrix says they conducted tests pitting HDX versus Teradici PCoIP with host hardware accelerators. According to Citrix, they set up two machines exactly alike, one using HDX and the other using Teradici PCoIP with the hardware host card. Citrix says the results showed the machine with HDX consumed 10 times less bandwidth versus the PCoIP machine.
My analysis:
I fully expect VMware to make an announcement that shows the exact reverse results that Citrix is showing. But I think the take away from this is bigger than the tit-for-tat numbers games that vendors particpate in for marketing. If HDX can help deliver graphical content to end users better and is 10x more efficient than the competition; that will force the competition to step up their quality, and a better experience to more of the end user population is the result. That’s good for us because we take yet another step in the progression of having a legitimate option to provision fully functional desktops from the data center to much more of the end user population.
I’d like to thank Calvin for his time talking with me about desktop virtualization in general, and HDX specifically.
More on Teradici is located here and more on HDX can be found on this web site.