Notes from the field - VMware View 4

PlanetEd Technologies is in the closing stages of our second VMware View 4 implementation. Since our vertical market at the moment is in the K-12 academic space, the majority of our users standing up VMware View environments are attempting to extend the lives of their existing workstations. In a few cases, this desire has negated the possibility of utilizing the PCoIP protocol for delivering a rich media experience.

VMware advises that SSE2 extensions are required on the View Client workstation in order for PCoIP to display. If SSE2 extensions are not available, the View Client will notify you upon connecting to the pool that an error occurred. Not real descriptive, but enough to let you know something went wrong. Enabling the old RDP protocol for connectivity to the pool from these specific clients typically resolves the problem.

Another weird technology issue we have experienced is the disappearance of the network adapter from View Desktops after a user logs off. This happens with PCoIP enabled desktops. It appears that by changing the protocol to RDP, this problem also resolves itself. We're working with VMware to try and resolve this issue.

For some positive notes....our clients have experienced some super performance out of the new View 4 desktops. Connections over T-1 lines back to the main datacenter do not seem to be as much of a virtualization hinderance as they were in View 3. We had some good tests today of some basic desktops and are pretty excited about how they worked!

We did discover a few downfalls though...If you build a basic XP workstation using the default settings when creating the virtual machine, the VM will have an IDE disk. VMware adds additional disk drives depending upon the pool type (all machines regardless get additional disks) and these are mounted as SCSI drives, which invokes a hardware wizard at first logon from a View Client. For admin users this is typically not an issue. For general users, this is an annoyance. To get around this issue, we went back to the drawing board and built VMs with the SCSI controlled disks.

We also had the opportunity to use the VMware ThinApp packager that comes default with the Premium Bundle. What an amazing product this has turned into. Read one of the three manuals to get a real appreciation for application streaming, and disk space maximization.

Minus the minor bugs, so far, so good!