Posted by Vittorio Viarengo
Vice President of Desktop Products
This week at VMworld 2010, we announced a strategy and set
of new and emerging products that will help businesses and governments move
beyond "IT as a Cost Center" to a more business-centric "IT as a
Service" model. I am excited
to finally be able to tell you about what we have been working on for a key
component of this new IT model – the top layer of a modern IT architecture –
End User Computing.
We have come a long way since this company launched our
first desktop product, VMware Workstation. From that humble beginning we
revolutionized the idea of virtualization, and radically simplified the data
center with products like ESX and then VMware vSphere. We also created the virtual desktop
market with the introduction of VDI 1.0 (now known as VMware View) in 2007. We
love this market and have created solutions that are as innovative as they are
simple. Along the way, we have
also helped customers deploy tens of thousands of virtual desktops.
It is because of this ongoing love affair that the VMware
View team is particularly proud to announce
another major View deployment at VMworld. The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Ltd
recently deployed 3,000 end users on View 4.0 and is in the process of rolling
it out to another 14,000.
View 4.0 has been a real tipping point for us in terms of
customer adoption and deployments.
But that was yesterday, today is a new day.
At VMworld 2010 we are announcing
VMware View 4.5, which will ship in early September. You can read
Scott Davis’ blog to learn all about the great innovation that went into
this release.
I want to highlight a couple of the principles that drove
the development of this release:
As customers start to run VDI solutions at scale, we invested a lot our development cycles in making VMware View 4.5 even easier to manage and more scalable. View has been recognized over the years as the best integrated solution for VDI on vSphere. With this release, we are raising the bar even further with a newly designed, single management console. We are also doubling the scalability per each individual pod from 5,000 to 10,000 desktops.
We are dramatically increasing the number of use cases for virtual desktop technology by lowering the upfront infrastructure cost to a new record low of $252 per seat, and by introducing the first offline VDI solution in the market. View 4.5 Local Mode allows users to check out their virtual desktop from the data center and take it on the road with them with a standard laptop.
The VMware View 4.5 team should be very proud of these
accomplishments.
At VMworld 2010 we are also introducing project Horizon.
This is an exciting R&D initiative that we have kept under the radar for a
while now. Horizon is the result
of a lot of new thinking at VMware around the future of end user and cloud
computing.
Under the leadership of our executive team, we have
refocused our commitment to solving the client computing issues that our
customers care about most. After all guys like Paul Maritz who led the
development of Microsoft Windows, Richard McAniff who led the Microsoft Excel
and Office team, and Tod Nielsen who built MSDN, know how to build compelling
end user computing solutions.
They asked us to think outside the box and look at the next
set of challenges that our customers need to solve.
The desktop as we know it today is being pulled apart by the
cloud.
-
Interactions and applications are moving increasingly toward a variety of different devices at the edge of the cloud
-
Computing is moving into the data center (private cloud) and so are applications
- The public cloud is changing everything with 85%
of new enterprise applications being delivered as SaaS (IDC)
VDI is definitely a fundamental first step to solve this
puzzle. By modularizing the desktop and delivering it as a managed service with
better security and manageability, customers can create better user experiences
and gain more control.
We need to build upon our success in VDI and move beyond the
Virtual Machine and the Hypervisor into the next level of abstraction –
abstracting applications (including SaaS) and data.
In our personal lives, the cloud has spoiled us rotten as
end users with high availability, along with ubiquitous and immediate access to
information and applications. But
this is not yet the case within the enterprise.
Our vision is to bring that consumer type of experience into
the enterprise.
We need to help our customers build the foundation of their
private clouds so that they can achieve the same level of service, speed and
reliability that the public cloud offers today. We need to help them centralize
and manage applications and data so that they can be delivered to end users on
any device with the right level of security and compliance.
Project Horizon shows the direction that we are undertaking
and we are all very excited about it.
A part of this transformation and increased commitment to
this space, we created a new business unit within VMware, the End User
Computing business unit, which includes our end user computing assets along
with the desktop business unit.
See you around at VMworld 2010, don’t miss the End User
Computing supersession on Thursday and the party Wednesday night.
Vittorio
For more information on the enhancements above and the other
features in the View 4.5 release be sure to check out the following sites:
View Point Blog: View 4.5 -
Modernizing the Window's Desktop - http://blogs.vmware.com/view-point/2010/08/view-45-modernizing-the-windows-desktop.html
- a more technical look at the View 4.5 release
View Home Page: http://www.vmware.com/go/view -
updated with new information related to the View 4.5 release
View Community Page: http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/entdesk/view
- keep up with the conversations, ask questions and learn more about View 4.5