Desktop Virtualization War Escalates

With the general availability of VMware View 4.0 today, VMware claims that its purpose-built PC-over-Internet (PCoIP) protocol for providing desktop virtualization via virtual machine software running on servers hosting its VSphere software is superior to the HDX protocol that Citrix has expanded from its original terminal services protocol to now include support for desktop virtualization.

In addition, VMware is positioning the combination of VMware View and V-Sphere as an ideal platform for providing managed services to virtual desktops, which is something the company is encouraging IT services companies to provide to customers.

As part of that effort, VMware has lined up IBM, Dell, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard as system vendor partners that intend to bundle VMware View and vSphere as an integrated offering.

In the absence of any direct head-to-head testing comparisons, it’s difficult to verify any of the claims about the relative merits of PCoIP versus ICA. But VMware does claims that the current combination of VMware View and vSphere can provision thousands of desktops and application instantaneously. VMware officials also claim that vSphere can scale to manage more than 1,000 hosts and 10,000 virtual machines from a single console. They also said that PCoIP can be applied to either traditional rich PC clients or thin clients, and that in the not too distant future VMware would have a mobile edition of the VMware hypervisor technology that would allow notebooks and other mobile devices to be managed as virtual desktops by VMware’s connection broker software.

Taken together, VMware is making a concerted push for deploying an end-to-end virtual server and desktop infrastructure that it claims will reduce infrastructure costs by 50 percent without requiring end users to compromise on any of the graphics-intensive or multimedia applications they have come to value on the desktop.