VMware View

PC-over-IP remote display technology: The inner workings of VMware View 4

VMware recently announced that the release of VMware View 4 is slated for later this month which will include a new display protocol called PC-over-IP (PCoIP), which should greatly enhance the user experience.

What is PCoIP?

PCoIP is a relatively new technology developed by a company called Teradici that VMware has chosen to partner with to use this technology in VMware View. Teradici has developed a breakthrough innovation in display compression and propagation over LAN and WAN networks that uses hardware chips on both the host and remote to offload the compression overhead.

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Freakonomics: How H1N1 boosts desktop virtualization adoption

Desktop virtualization vendors are spinning their wheels trying to get enterprises to adopt the technology, but it turns out, all they really needed was a good pandemic.

I met with some of VMware Inc.’s desktop virtualization reps yesterday to discuss the next version of VMware View (4.0), which is due out next week, and learned there is a correlation between desktop virtualization adoption rates and the 2009 H1N1 flu (formerly known as Swine Flu).   

Though he couldn’t share specific numbers, Raj Mallempati, the desktop virtualization marketing manager, said VMware’s VDI adoption rates increased in direct correlation with H1N1 flu. In fact, he said VMware sold a VDI license in Australia for the first time when H1N1 started alarming people there this summer.

“It makes you think, did VMware invent swine flu?” Mallempati joked.

They saw the same spike in desktop virtualization adoption when the SARS virus hit a few years ago, he said.

VMware claims to have around 1.5 million VMware View license holders so far, which is between 6-7% of the company’s revenue, according to a VMware rep.

While these correlations could be coincidental, deploying desktop virtualization certainly makes sense for corporations that don’t want to lose productivity every time a deadly virus pops up (gotta love capitalism). With VDI, employees who don’t want to come into work because they are afraid of the sneezer in the next cubuicle can access their desktops from home. Or if they are sick, they can still work from their quarantine and not infect everyone else in the office.

So, although I haven’t seen any marketing campaigns fear-mongering customers into buying desktop virtualization as a way to avoid H1N1, it wouldn’t surprise me.

VMware View Composer and vCenter architecture

With the recent release of VMware View, one of the hottest components of the desktop virtualization component is the linked clone technology. In planning how VMware View works, it is important to understand the critical component - VMware View Composer.

VMware View Composer is simply a Windows service that resides on a vCenter server. VMware View Composer interacts with both vCenter and the View Connection Manager. For environments that already have a server based VMware environment with vCenter and ESX hosts, it is clear that a separate environment is a good idea. This would be best served through dedicated hosts, storage and a separate vCenter server. The figure below shows how the VMware View Composer and vCenter installations would work together:

The VMware View Composer service, or svid, interacts with vCenter from the configuration set forth from VMware View Connection manager, which functions as the broker for connections. Once the linked clone virtual desktops are created, they then deliver the storage optimization that we have been anticipating with the release of VMware View.

One other feature of View Composer is storage over-commit. This functionality is a configurable level of how the linked clones’ delta disk, or differencing disk, is allocated. Looking at a guest virtual machine, the delta disk would be a very small percentage of the parent or base VM. This setting will determine the behavior of determining how many VMs will fit on a datastore. A setting of conservative will enable less VMs to fit on a datastore, yet run less of a likelihood of running out of space. While a more aggressive level will attempt to put more VMs on the datastore and reserve less storage reserved for the delta disks. With that information, it is critically important to get an expectation of the delta disk behavior to best utilize the storage.

A final key component of View Composer is the Quickprep feature. Quickprep does the guest VM specific tasks such as domain membership, organizational unit placement in Active Directory and run any scripts on the guest VM.

With this information primer on VMware View Composer, it is important to isolate the vCenter and more importantly be aware of how the virtual desktop managment agents will interact with the vCenter server. More information on VMware View can be found on the VMware website.