VMware Horizon Community
BISGInc
Contributor
Contributor

Things We'd Like To See in View 5.0

Just thought I would kick off a discussion with things we (our company, clients and prospects) would like to see in View 5.0:

  • Local Drive Mapping - for users on the soft client, it would sometimes be handy to be able to map through to the local drives.  Citrix and Microsoft allow this in their products, and because some of our clients are coming from a Citrix/TS/RDS world, the lack of this ability is often noticed.

  • GPU virtualization - this is a big one.  We often run into clients that require OpenGL support and this rules out View as a solution.   Of course heavy AutoCAD and things like that will always be difficult in this environment, but we have seen clients that use software packages that require OpenGL for mundane tasks.  Some examples include a Kitchen Cabinet refacer and a Flood Cleanup / Restoration company.

  • Combine Internal and External VCS - the fact that we need to run two different VMs to allow internal and external PCoIP connections is maddening.   Allowing external PCoIP connections in View 4.6 was a nice first step, but we really need to have this happen on a single VM.

  • Improve USB Support - too many USB devices cause too many strange behaviors.   Hit the eject button on a DVD drive and the session resets.  Scan on a USB scanner and the DVM crashes.   Again, there were improvements in firmware 3.3.x but this is an area that still needs a LOT of attention.

  • Improve PCoIP Bandwidth Consumption on WANs - I'm a VMware Fan, I admit it...however PCoIP is still not ready for prime time.  It has huge problems running across MLPPP links (bonded T1s).   VMware Tech Support told me a few days ago that we needed to plan for "1.5 to 3.0mbps PER USER".  Come on...that is just not realistic when other products (RDP, ICA, HDX, etc) do an admirable job with a fraction of the bandwidth.  We have also seen situations where a single PCoIP endpoint can saturate a WAN link of, say 10mbps.  No problem there.   Fire up 10-15 end points and the best utilization we can get is 5-6mbps.  The protocol seems to struggle when there are other PCoIP endpoints contending for the same bandwidth.  I could go on and on with this one... PCoIP is just not yet ready for prime time.... It hurts to write that.   I hope they improve SOON!

So, given the above... what are your comments?   What would YOU like to see in VMware View 5.0?

Rick

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43 Replies
eeg3
Commander
Commander

The issues I ran into were in March and both were handled by a combined three different people, but none with your name. Let me start out saying that it is obvious to me that you are very knowledgable and helpful from your posts here, so I hope this doesn't come off as an attack. I have nothing but the utmost respect for you from what I seen on these forums.

I have had 2 support incidents with Teradici (I can send you the Ticket #s):

1) PCoIP Gateway Issue Only Occurring with Zero Clients: This was opened on 3/9/11 in the morning and received a response back 9 hours later. I responded back 15 minutes after their response. My next response from Teradici was seven days later on 3/16/11 at 7PM EST. The solution from Teradici did not work, and the support rep told me that he had reached the end of what he could do and that I needed to call VMware support. VMware support was who recommended I call Teradici. I was basically sent in a loop between two companies. It would have been nice if their support teams were on the same company in this incident. I ended up solving the problem with a workaround on my own.

2) Mouse Out-of-Sync Issue: This was opened on 3/28/11. I received a response back via email requesting more info the next day 3/29/11. I responded back two hours later, and then again the next day including a video of what was happening. I did not receive a response back from Teradici until 5/2/11. That's over a month. :smileycry: When they responded back a month later, I did not even bother continuing the conversation as at that point I was too frustrated to even continue and the ticket was subsequently closed.

I think VMware, Teradici, and users would benefit from a combination of forces. I'm not sure what the benefits of staying separate are.

Blog: http://blog.eeg3.net
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gunnarb
Expert
Expert

Let's talk about this off list.  Sending you a Private message now.  For those listening, this isn't the norm at Teradici so I want to figure out how this occured and resolve it.  Please send questions to support@teradici.com our goal is to be a great and free information source.

-Gunnar

Gunnar Berger http://www.gunnarberger.com http://www.endusercomputing.com
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BISGInc
Contributor
Contributor

Gunnar-

Are you, by chance, working with VMware support on their Support Request 11067728705?

If so, can you email me?   My info is attached to that case.

Regards,

Rick

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rmacho
Contributor
Contributor

I'd love to see View agents for both Ubuntu and OSX server. I can create VMs with these guest OSs on ESXi (well, ok, not OSX just yet), but I also want to deploy virtual desktops based on those VMs since not all our users want to use W7.  Work in progress, I've heard, but no confirmation.

Ciao, Rafael

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