Blog by PQR

A short description about your blog

A load balancer for VMware View is not a requirement in a VMware View infrastructure with less than 2000 users. Even when there are multiple VMware View Connection servers for high availability, a single VMware View Connection server can handle up to 2000 connections so it’s not a big deal that the sessions are not evenly balanced. You do however want to have multiple VMware View Connection servers for high availability and to be able to access multiple VMware View Connection servers from a single point of access. A load balancer provides that functionality but is often expensive and gives additional functionality not needed for smaller deployments, like SSL Offloading. There is however a free “Enterprise-ready” load balancer available from Citrix: Netscaler VPX Express. There is a 5 Mbit throughput limit, but that is not an issue and in this article I explain why.


I’ve been working with VMware View Local Mode for couple of weeks now and I wanted to share my experience. VMware View Local Mode allows a virtual desktop to be downloaded to a laptop or desktop and to be executed locally. The CPU, memory, disk, network and graphics from the local desktop is being used to execute the virtual desktop. No remote display protocol is being used. VMware View Local mode is also part of the Client Side Desktop Virtualization (CSDV) Smackdown, a whitepaper which explains what CSDV is, when to use it and what the possibilities are. This whitepaper will be comparable to the VDI smackdown, only this time it will not be about server-hosted desktop virtualization, but client-hosted desktop virtualization. This whitepaper is expected to be released in Q1 of 2012. In this blogpost I will share my experience with VMware View Local mode, how it works and what doesn’t work.


Do you remember when you first saw Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect in action? Playing games without a controller! It looked kind of dumb at first, people standing in front of a TV making exaggerated and weird moves, but when you tried Kinect yourself for the first time, it was fun to do and it worked pretty well. However, after a while it turns out that Kinect is a 1.0 version with it’s own limitation and you’ll have to wait for a year before new games will come out that uses all of the capabilities of the Kinect. This is kind of the feeling I have now about Ericom AccessNow for VMware View, the HTML5 client for VMware View. At first you think it’s probably not that good without a “real” VMware View client installed, but once you try it, you’re amazed how easy it is to setup and use it. After a short while, you see the limitations the product still has and you’d rather wait for a next version which has more features and has a better user experience.