VMware Horizon Community
lbragg
Contributor
Contributor

Reasons to upgrade to View 5???

Ok--so currently we are running on View 4.6 with all the hosts on ESXi 4.1 U1.

We are also running the same esxi version in our server-side environment.

Our current VDI deployment is at about 50 clients and is really starting to explode as more and more of our clients are really wanting to be virtualized.

All our virtual desktops are Windows 7 64-bit SP1.  All our clients are using Samsung NC240 zero-clients.

So.......   my thoughts as an admin would be that it might not be a bad idea to get the upgrade done before our deployment gets much bigger...but....since View 5 is very new i'm a little hesitant and don't want to shoot myself in the foot.

So----any suggestions, reasons for or against upgrading?

Do i need to have our server environment on Vsphere 5 before upgrading the VDI environment?

We currently have a separate Vcenter and hosts for VDI, but we are running both VCenters in linked mode--so I wasn't sure if that would be an issue.

Just wanting some feedback from anyone that has upgraded to View 5.

Thanks

Reply
0 Kudos
11 Replies
caryers
Contributor
Contributor

I second all these motions. We are almost an identical shop. 4.6 View platform (currently in pilot phase for nearly 50 users as well) running 4.6 ESXi servers also providing only Win7 SP1 32-bit VDI VMs. The only difference in our environment is we use UniDesk. So far UniDesk is a great solution for our needs. UniDesk replaces Linked-Clones and ThinApp'ing and provided a TRULY persistent desktop. AppSense, RingCube, and other players fall short in all these 3 areas.

With that said, I am very curious about View 5's biggest enhancements it claims:

  • Premier Edition only: View user profile Management which VMware calls persona,providing user personalization to stateless desktops.

I am hoping our buddy mittim12 chimes in here.

Thanks Community for any feedback!

Reply
0 Kudos
mittim12
Immortal
Immortal

The PCOIP optimization and View Persona makes me want to go out and upgrade right now Smiley Happy    Of course no one wants to be the one to discover any bugs or problems with a product so it's always best to lab or test the upgrade first.   In your case I would definitely upgrade to View 5 first as it runs on vSphere 4.1 update 1 with no problems.   I also don't think View 4.6 is supported running on vSphere 5. 

So upgrade to View 5 and then move to the vSphere 5 update for the the environment.    Also just found out something recently about linked mode.  You can not run mixed vCenter versions if they are in linked mode.  The minute you update the first one the link will be broken until the second vCenter has been updated too.

I wanted to add a link to Andre's site, http://myvirtualcloud.net/.  He has been pumping out a lot of great View 5 blog post since the announcement.

Reply
0 Kudos
mittim12
Immortal
Immortal

I played around with the View persona piece during the beta and thought it was very cool.   We currently use Appsense and I will definitley be looking at View persona as a replacement to that.

On a side note I'm a big Unidesk fan.   You have had a positive experience with them?

Reply
0 Kudos
admin
Immortal
Immortal

View 5 is really not that new. Depending on how you look at it. It is new in the sense that, we made it available yesterday. It is new in the sense the volume of code we delivered though new features, bug fixes and performance optimizations is new. The software development days of monolithic versions branched from the previous versions are quickly disappearing. Sure, you have no idea how we build and develop software right? Smiley Happy

I can tell you View 5 was built off of View 4.6, the connection manager is the same. What I mean by that is there was not a major architecture change to View 5. New value added features were added, loads of bug fixes across all areas and bunches of performance optimizations.

We have over 5000 internal dogfood hours on 5.0 in our dogfood environment not counting our standard QE, and system test that has been on going. There were 1000s of beta participants working with View 5 over the last several months. At VMworld all 400+ lab stations for the hands on labs were run on beta View 5 from our cloud lab system.

Our process internally goes along these lines - We have friends and family of our development who run bleeding edge. For example; as I was winding down the View 5 launch and dogfood, I migrated last week over to the next releases of vSphere / View. I am already living in a virtual desktop using the latest and greatest things were are developing and working on. At the same time our View 5 dogfood will now transition to production for all View users.

As the bleeding edge makes progress and gets closer to their own betas, it will move to dogfood. I will move along with it until we get close to release, at which time I will move to bleeding edge and others will move from dogfood to production.

Does that mean you will not hit any problems? No, it is software all software has bugs Smiley Happy

The speed at which you move should be what you are comfortable with and have the resources to handle. If there is feature functionality, performance improvements or bug fixes you want, start planning it!!!

WP

Reply
0 Kudos
lbragg
Contributor
Contributor

So--about the vcenter linked mode---so we would need to upgrade all our vcenters to 5 to keep linked-mode working?

Will Vcenter 5 work in a 4.1 environment?  Basically if we upgraded our vcenters and nothing else?

The reason i ask is that our management really likes the one pane of glass view that linked mode offers, but we are probably a while out before we upgrade our server environment to Vsphere 5.

Thanks for all the input!!

Reply
0 Kudos
mittim12
Immortal
Immortal

vCenter 5 should be able to manage 4.1 host, http://partnerweb.vmware.com/comp_guide/sim/interop_matrix.php.  I would still pour over the upgrade guide to see if there are any gotchas.

Reply
0 Kudos
lbragg
Contributor
Contributor

One other thing since someone mentioned Unidesk--i've been looking at it and wandering what additional benefits it would still provide since View 5 added the persona management?

Is it still worth the cost?

Thanks

Reply
0 Kudos
mittim12
Immortal
Immortal

I'll let someone who has it in production answer your questions since they work with the product every day.   I just wanted to add that I found out at VMworld if you already have View Premier licenses than you could get a good discount on the unidesk licenses. 

Reply
0 Kudos
lbragg
Contributor
Contributor

Sweet--all our licensing is View Premier. Smiley Happy 

Reply
0 Kudos
caryers
Contributor
Contributor

Yes, UniDesk does provide a significant discount if you are a View Premier customer. UniDesk and Vmware(from my understanding) have a good

collaboration together.

From my research, price comparisons, and in-depth demos with the vendors with the 3rd party VDI players(Appsense, RingCube, UniDesk, & RESoftware) are two fold:

* Price comparison is basically the same with all 4 players. (If there is a Home Depot on a corner, you know Lowes will be there soon with the same

   offerings & prices, etc) Basically these players license ~$50 per seat with a $10 yearly maintenance/renewal per seat. Each vendor will have a small

   financial caveat to endice you to come on board.

* Technical aspect:

I have found that UniDesk is the leader regarding the 3 main areas that I deem are critcial: Storage savings, "True" persistence, app deployment. Other than UniDesk, all other players do not provide an all in 1 solution. From my understanding with the technical demo I had with Appsense, they rely on VMware Linked-clones(LC). Nor do they save manually installed apps. Appsense seems to be overkill for our profile needs. I believe the same is true for RingCube. I am not sure if this product changed since Citrix bought them out. I am actually doing my technical demo with RES Software tomorrow. As we know, VMware's LCs do not provide a "Truly" persistent desktop. UniDesk uses Cachepoints to deploy say 1 single golden image that 40, 50 or more VMs will use but only consume the golden image(~15-20 gig) footprint ONLY once per cachepoint. Application are created(layered) similar to ThinApp, but at a far greater success rate. When I was "kicking the tires" on ThinApping, our success rate was 35%. Actually, I have yet had any issues creating a UniDesk "layered" application. (I don NOT work for UniDesk). At last but not least, truly persistent desktops. It saves all local modification at the file level, registry level, and all the other small critical apps(unique to each department per say) that users may install that are not deployable at the enterprise level. We currently use MS's SCCM. I have been using UniDesk in our 4.6 pilot for about 2.5 months now. I love it.

I can provide two XLS files that shows all the benefits from these different players and how they work in our projected 100 user VDI Pilot environment upon request.

Thanks,

Scott

Reply
0 Kudos
caryers
Contributor
Contributor

Not sure if you ever got my response to your UniDesk positive feedback request or not. We are hooked on UniDesk. Some key players in the AV field have a hard time working seamlessly with the UniDesk layering aspect. These players are SEP12 and some of the TrendMicro Deep Secuiryt functionality.

Thanks,

Reply
0 Kudos