VMware Announces Storage Accelerator and On-Premise Horizon App Manager

Many organizations are looking to VDI for cost savings, scale, and uniformity. But what if you could have all those advantages coupled with improved speed? VMware today announced that it will be able to deliver greatly improved performance with the addition of a new feature called View Storage Accelerator. The feature, available in the 5.1 release of View, will allow organizations to take data that is read from disk and cache it in the hypervisor memory. The data that is read from the hypervisor memory is read at 10 times the performance as compared to having to go back to disk. This functionality, once the realm of only expensive high-end SAN infrastructure solutions such as EMC or NetApp, is now within reach of most any IT department.

There are two ways to take advantage of this feature. You could allow View’s algorithms to automatically detect frequently used files to put in the cache or, better yet, manually place desired data there. This means you are now able to cache an entire windows image in memory. Organizations that use golden images for non-persistent desktop scenarios would see significant improvement in performance. The only requirement is that enough memory be allocated to account for the size of the OS image.

The announcement of View 5.1 today also comes with improved Persona Management. In wiping out a user’s desktop each time they log off, the ability to personalize it is lost. Persona Management stores those settings separate from the OS image and overlays those settings each time you give the user a new desktop. From the user’s perspective it looks and feels like their desktop, but it is clean and new every time. While View already allowed you to store persona settings, with 5.1 you can extend persona management to physical machines. This means you will now be able to migrate the persona on a physical machine to a virtual one and vice versa. Users that go back and forth between physical and virtual machines will now be able to have their user settings following them. In addition to the announcement of View Storage Accelerator and improved Persona Management, VMware announced a View client for the Kindle.

VMware also announced today that Horizon App Manager will now be available as an on-premise solution and not just as a hosted solution. This will greatly raise awareness and accessibility of the platform due to VMware’s traditionally on-premise deployment of their solutions. The flexibility of being able to deliver Horizon’s management capabilities both on-premise or in the cloud is strategic win for VMware.

VMware, with its deep preexisting trust relationship with enterprise IT, is in a fantastic position to maneuver into the middle of the next generation of IT management via Horizon. VMware Horizon has the foundational capabilities to manage devices, apps, and data by policy and user context. It would make perfect sense for VMware to continue this march towards a comprehensive platform that casts a wide net over enterprise mobility management. It will be interesting to see how VMware continues to evolve the Horizon platform.

VMware Assembling a Complete Picture for Enterprise Mobility Management – MWC12

I want to give you a sneak peek into my conversation with Ben Goodman, Lead Evangelist for VMware horizon. VMWare has some exciting stuff going on in the area of MDM (Mobile Device Management), MAM (Mobile Application Management), and MIM (Mobile Information Management). This is a topic that I know many of you are very interested in, so I will devote some longer pieces to it – post Mobile World Congress 2012 – because it is worth going into detail on. So here is a taste. Goodman, working in conjunction with his team at VMware, is approaching the issue of Enterprise Mobility Management with a broad and visionary approach. It is visionary in the sense that they understand that the end game for managing enterprise mobility, from and IT perspective, requires not only device and app management, but also people/information management. Goodman relayed how VMware’s Horizon application provides users a seamless experience on different platforms (mobile, pc, laptops, etc.). Users are able have one log in and one place to go on any platform for all business application access and content. Couple this with VMware’s products that provide the ability to perform device and app management and you have a very complete enterprise mobility management platform. Look for lots more on this in the weeks to come. (Thanks for Brian Katz for the introduction!)