5 things missing in VMware's new virtual desktop app, View 4

Lack of bandwidth, virtualization, full Windows 7 support, application personalization, and some higher costs are areas that could use improvement, analysts say

With VMware Inc.'s release of View 4 last week, the company is promising two things: Full desktop performance at a desktop price tag.

Desktop virtualization requires huge amounts of data to be constantly streamed from server to client. Moreover, the cost of building out a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), including servers, storage, network bandwidth, thin clients and software licenses, has generally outweighed potential savings in IT labor and security costs.

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That is a "huge, huge change" in View 4, asserted Rick Jackson, chief marketing officer for VMware. View 4 is so efficient that some apps run faster virtually than when loaded from a local hard drive, he said. Moreover, the "acquisition cost barrier" has been "neutralized."

"I don't see how a CIO with a large desktop population doesn't look at this," Jackson said in an interview this week.

For all the sizzle, analysts cite five ways the steak isn't fully cooked.

1. Bandwidth bandwidth bandwidth. View 4 uses a new compression protocol called PC-over-IP (PCoIP) licensed from Teradici Corp. Chris Wolf, an analyst with the Burton Group, said he and his clients have tested the View 4 beta. Over local area networks, PCoIP "performs very well," he said. But PCoIP is still enough of a bandwidth hog that trying to deliver high-definition video or support multiple monitors to remote users or branch offices over wide area networks remains "impractical," Wolf said.

Also, PCoIP natively encrypts all data traffic, according to Wolf, meaning that companies can't use WAN traffic accelerators such as those from Riverbed Technology Inc.

Finally, VMware doesn't offer a VDI appliance, such as those from Kaviza Inc. , to enable acceptable remote performance, said Wolf. That forced some of Burton's clients, for now, to rule out View 4 for development centers in India, he said.

2. Lack of local virtualization. One way that VMware could deliver better performance to remote desktop as well as mobile laptop users is by allowing View 4 to run locally and synchronizing only occasionally. That's what VMware's Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) will do.

Problem is, VMware announced CVP more than a year ago and doesn't plan to deliver it until the middle of next year, Jackson said. That is later than Citrix's equivalent, called Xenclient, is scheduled to arrive, said independent analyst Brian Madden, as well as already available apps from Neocleus Inc. and Virtual Computer Inc.

Such client hypervisors "will be a big, big deal for 2010," he said.

3. Full Windows 7 support. Despite being released weeks after Windows 7, View 4 still only offers beta support for Microsoft's latest OS, said Raj Mallempati, a product marketing manager at VMware. He declined to offer a timetable but Madden expects VMware to be targeting June next year.

But planning for PC deployments can take years, meaning that VMware could be too late for some enterprises that have already started their planning.

"You want to get in real early so you can be part of any PC migration project," Wolf said.