Overview

VMware View is probably the most talked about desktop delivery solution due to the obvious benefits and features in the latest release of virtual desktop. Virtualisation of desktop workloads is a potentially enormous IT cost reduction method, as complex OS/application support for thousands of disparate desktops is simplified down to the support effort of managing 1 PC.

Simple Setup

VMware View is a desktop delivery method with its foundation being a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) broker. Users can connect into the connection broker from a variety of different client devices and are mapped to an available Windows XP/Vista VM instance using the RDP protocol. The end-user experience is as close to logging onto their own PC as is possible. VMware View installs as a service on Windows 2003 and integrates into an Active Directory domain and existing VMware infrastructure of vCenter managing ESX hosts. Taupo would deploy multiple brokers to ensure a highly available topology.

Simple Build of Windows Desktop

A pool of Windows desktop VMs can be created with a basic Windows gold image with support for persistent or non-persistent desktop sessions (the difference is whether or not a user is tied to a specific desktop, or if they simply log in to the next available desktop). In a standardised environment, for example a call centre, non-persistent desktops are an excellent choice, since users are unlikely to be using more than one or two applications, nor will they need a place to store their personal data tied to that desktop. This prevents over complication of a desktop delivery method and avoids multiple applications and incompatibilities. This simplification of desktop delivery and reduction in desktop complexity lowers operational expenditure as we no longer are supporting a complex desktop environment.

Minimal Desktop Management including Patching

Another key benefit of VMware View is the ability to quickly and easily add and remove applications, patches, and service packs to large numbers of desktops. View allows desktops to be linked clones. This term means that essentially all users are running from the same base disk containing Windows XP/Vista. So if we need to patch the Windows desktop operating system, we are only performing the patch operation once! When a user logs off, their previous VM is deleted and a new one will be provisioned in seconds based upon the updated gold image.

Standardisation of the Desktop

There are a number of ways to connect to a View desktop VM. You can connect from a number of hardware devices including legacy Windows & Linux PCs, thin client devices such as SunRay, Wyse, ChipPC or numerous vendors XP embedded devices. The Windows client for existing PCs and Windows XP embedded offers the full VMware View multimedia and USB redirection capabilities; however some other hardware vendors provide their equivalent functionality through additional software drivers. An alternative delivery method is via standard web browser where the user can use an applet in the browser to obtain their desktop; depending on the browser, this could be viewed full screen so the user experience is again as close to standard PC as possible.

Minimal Storage Requirements

You would expect that a small desktop VM might require a 10GB hard disk, and creating a pool with 100 virtual desktops would then require 1TB in storage. However, using VMware View linked clones, the total storage requirements of 100 users would only require a fraction of that space (on average 300MB per clone). View manages this by using the snapshot of the base VM as a baseline and creating links to that baseline for each VM. Each desktop runs as a delta to the primary, with any and all changes made to the VM during normal use stored in the delta. View offers the option of creating a user disk with a fixed limit for users to store files separately from the linked clone this can be on a completely separate LUN on the SAN.

The huge advantage of linked clones is the reduction in SAN footprint in the data centre required to support even the largest virtual desktop deployments.

Application Compatibility & Streamed Delivery

Our business users require robust and highly available applications. IT administrators are very much aware of how quickly running multiple applications from multiple vendors can become a support headache. For example, one application might not co-exist with another due file or registry conflicts, or maybe multiple versions of the same application need to co-exist. VMware View solves this problem with minimal configuration effort, by changing the way some or all applications are delivered. VMware View includes a software technology called ThinApp. This is also known as application virtualisation and is an abstraction technology. Rather than each application installing into Windows and consuming folder space in Program Files or system directories and polluting the registry, ThinApp makes things neater. Each application can sit in a sandbox within Windows; each application runs as it’s own process as it would normally, however each application works with it’s own registry, Program files and system directory. Your users could be running MS Word 2.0 and MS Word 2007 side by side in the same copy of Windows XP/Vista without any compatibility issue. In fact, this technology can also enable XP applications to run on Vista due to the simplification of the Windows environment which the application is presented with.

A final simplification is that ThinApps are delivered as a single file. So an entire application is delivered as a single file and does not need to be part of the base (gold) image of your virtual desktop. Therefore, your gold image can be minimal footprint and applications can be delivered as ThinApps from a network accessible location. As long as the application is packaged as a ThinApp, the need for application compatibility testing is eliminated!

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