Yesterday, May 16, 2012 VMware released View 5.1, which has many nice improvements over View 5.0. You can find a link to all the latest documentation here. If you are licensed for View, you can download the bits here. The most exciting feature to me is CBRC, which can help reduce read I/Os on the storage system for common blocks in VDMK images. You are still on your own with handing writes, though. So this feature great for helping to mitigate boot storms. The greatly improved USB support (essentially USB pass-through) is great for environments that connect a variety of USB devices to their desktops, such as phones or other devices.
New Features include:
- Advanced storage options that leverage vSphere 5.0 – The following performance optimizations and integration features take advantage of vSphere 5.0 enhancements:
- View Storage Accelerator uses Content Based Read Cache (CBRC) – CBRC is an ESXi 5.0 server memory cache of common blocks. During peak I/O workloads such as logon boot storms, View desktops can access common blocks of the OS disk and shared applications in the main memory cache, improving performance, enhancing the user experience, and saving storage array costs.
- Tech Preview: View Composer Array Integration with VAAI – Additional View Composer cloning options leverage the vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) Native Cloning capability of Network Attached Storage (NAS). Note: The storage vendors developing support for NFS native cloning (VAAI) need additional certification to support the View workload. CBRC is not supported with the NFS native cloning feature.
- Customizable View Composer disposable disk drive letter.
- Support for up to 32 hosts in a cluster when Network File System (NFS) is in use. (The former limit was 8 hosts per cluster.)
- Improved USB support. USB devices are now passed through to the hosted VDI VM and do not require device-specific drivers on the Windows client device.
- Radius two-factor authentication support.
- View Administrator user interface (UI) enhancements – These include context menus, linking to saved View Administrator pages, enhanced table column viewing, and globalization and localization in five languages.
- Support for pre-created Active Directory machine accounts.
- Optional customer experience improvement program. View collects anonymous data about View usage to help make View more responsive to customer needs. No user-identifiable data is collected. You can opt in or out of the program at any time.
- View Persona Management is supported on physical computers – View Persona Management (virtual profiles) can manage user profiles across physical computers and View desktops. Simultaneous sessions are not supported.
- View Persona Management user profile migration – The View Persona Management utility migrates Windows user profiles from Windows XP to Windows 7. The utility migrates profiles from physical computers to View or from View to View.
- Standalone View Composer server – View supports the installation of the View Composer server on a standalone machine separate from VMware vCenter Server.
