Source: Gartner
Today at VMworld North America, VMware announced the availability of VMware View 4.5. The View 4.5 Premier release represents a significant milestone as it places VMware very close to Citrix as the only two vendors that offer enterprise-ready server-hosted virtual desktop (SHVD) solutions.
For Gartner to consider View 4.5 enterprise-ready, it had to meet all requirements in the Burton Group Server Hosted Virtual Desktop evaluation criteria.
The evaluation criteria was developed over a five month period. During that time, Gartner worked with numerous early server-hosted virtual desktop (SHVD) adopters, as well as the key vendors in the space. In the end, vendors were supportive of the criteria in spite of the fact that not one met all of our requirements. The reason for the support was simple – customers were telling vendors they needed the same elements that we identified in the criteria.
Gartner evaluate and score SHVD platforms across three stratifications:
- Required: absolute necessities
- Preferred: important features that result in better experience, operational management, and improved TCO
- Optional: use-case driven features needed in select deployment scenarios
The assessment is broken down across major areas of focus such as user experience, management, and security. .
When we first assessed VMware View 4.0, there were several significant shortcomings that were deal-breakers for many large enterprises:
- Role-based access controls (RBACs) for delegation of administrative duties
- Administrative change logging capabilities to provide an audit trail for all administrative actions
- Official support for Windows 7 operating systems
- Enterprise management software integration
View 4.5 addressed all four of the above shortcomings, and the breadth of their feature improvements were deeply scrutinized with hands-on assessments in our lab. To VMware’s credit, they didn’t try to address customer management requirements with band aids. Instead, they literally scrapped their previous management console and replaced with a far improved Adobe Flex-based console. In addition, they unveiled a Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) management pack for View 4.5 management. That was another common request I’ve heard from early VMware View adopters. On the scalability side, View 4.5 is now capable of scaling to 10,000 managed desktops per management domain, which is currently double the maximum scalability supported by Citrix.
Of course, while View 4.5 is a major release, there is still room for improvement. For example, if you want to optimize PCoIP traffic through WAN accelerators such as Riverbed appliances, you’re out of luck. Out of the box, VMware will not support highly constrained WAN environments (i.e., 50 Kbps bandwidth and over 150 ms of latency). VMware’s current recommended solution is to combine the View 4.5 “local desktop” feature with an HTTP proxy server at the remote site.
While there is always room for improvement, View 4.5 meets all of the core requirements of the typical larger enterprise. Enterprise customers understand that any next generation desktop solution requires a long term (typically 5 year) commitment to yield significant ROI and TCO savings. So today many are looking for a platform that they can standardize on and grow with. With the release of View 4.5, VMware is making the case that it should be the enterprise desktop and application delivery platform of the future. Citrix and other VMware competitors will not take this news lying down.