Jan 13
VMware View 3 Improves VDI
Eric Inch
I enjoy learning, using and helping others through technology. This is my second year with C/D/H after many years of consulting for numerous small and mid-sized companies. I enjoy challenging projects and continual improvement in all areas. Most recently, I have been working to help grow the virtualization practice at C/D/H and hopefully add that area to the already impressive expertise in infrastructure consulting at C/D/H.
When I’m not working, I enjoy spending time with my family. I have two little girls who keep me extremely busy but are always the highlight of my day.
For a more in-depth bio and a list of my areas of expertise, please visit http://www.cdh.com.
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Articles by Eric Inch
Earlier this month VMware released VMware View 3 which offers some great new features to their already popular Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution. VDI expands virtualization to the desktop by allowing hosted desktops to reside in the datacenter. In the datacenter you can take advantage of advanced infrastructure features such as High Availability (HA) and distributed load balancing. The two improvements to the VDI solution I am going to quickly discuss are Linked Clones and Offline Desktop. I’m also including a link to the ThinApp solution I discussed in a previous C/D/H Knowledge Transfer article.
Linked clones
One main cost associated with earlier versions of VDI – storage requirements for the hosted desktops. For example, if you had 100 Windows XP virtual machines configured with 10 GB disks then you would need 1 TB of storage for the virtual desktops. You could easily find yourself using a lot of enterprise storage to hold all the virtual machines dedicated to VDI. Now you can create one “golden master” disk that can be shared across numerous hosted desktops. The main disk, with the operating system and any applications included in the image, can be created once and shared. All changes and user data will be stored in a separate disk that is linked back to the master. As you can imagine, VMware has really saved VDI customers a lot by greatly reducing storage needs.
Offline desktop
The ability to check out and check in a virtual desktop is currently listed for experimental use, but is included with VMware View 3 and can be used to take your desktops on-the-go. You have the ability to check out a VDI desktop, use it when you’re away from the office, then synchronize the changes back when you return. The security policies for the offline desktop will follow along while it’s away from the datacenter. I can imagine this will be a desirable feature as more and more users are using laptops.
Also included in the Premier package is application virtualization with ThinApp (see article).
I encourage everyone to take a closer look at this release of VMware’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure product.