October 16, 2013
News has been trickling out steadily from VMware's Barcelona conference about its new acquisitions and network virtualization offerings. But it's the desktop that VMware is attacking -- sorry, "virtualizing" -- aggressively, giving enterprises less incentives than ever to replace existing desktop hardware. Which, in enterprises that are fast becoming populated with tablets and smartphones, might not be such a bad idea after all.
Some of the pieces for this assault have been in place for a while now, courtesy of VMware's Horizon View product. Back in March the company introduced a new feature called HTML Access, which allowed people using any HTML5-compliant browser to access a Horizon View desktop. No plug-ins, nothing to download. The protocol VMware created for this -- named Blast -- now also supports streaming audio and works on Google Chromebooks as well. It still doesn't support attached USB devices, but that's a hurdle I doubt can be overcome without the use of a native client or, at the very least, plug-ins.
The 5.3 revision of VMware Horizon is said to bring a slew of user-experience improvements that are designed to make working on a virtualized desktop as close as possible to the real thing -- e.g., using VMware's vDGA technology for high-performance graphics, where GPUs on the vSphere host can be assigned to specific virtual desktops and perform direct pass-through to the host. (vDGA even supports CUDA and OpenGL.) Apparently, among the folks who gave VMware the most feedback about this were people doing CAD and other high-end graphics work on their systems, and they wanted as close to a native desktop experience as possible.
Most of the complaints about virtual desktops have revolved around end-user performance. Obviously, the best performance for vDGA comes when you use a platform-native VMware access client, but given the way HTML5 continues to advance by leaps and bounds, I wouldn't be surprised if in time the performance available through a browser comes close enough to the VMware client to make picking one over the other trivial. What will not happen any time soon -- barring some kind of major revolution in the way browsers can talk to their hosts -- is, again, support for the kind of advanced hardware connectivity only possible with a native client or browser add-ons.
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