What is VMware View / VMware Horizon View

VMware Horizon

What is VMware View / VMware Horizon

VMware View or VMware Horizon View is end-to-end solutions that simplify the management of IT that leverages vSphere as the virtual desktop. Term “VMware View” or “VMware Horizon View” is actually refer to the same thing.

It increases security and control of end users while decreasing costs by centrally runs a desktop services from the servers in a data center. This desktop service also called virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). VMware View enables highly available, scalable, secure and reliable desktop services unmatched by physical PCs.

Its first two releases (2.0.0 and 2.1.0) sold under the name VMware VDM, but the name changed to “VMware View” in the 3.0.0 release in 2008. In April 2014, VMware launched its Horizon 6 virtual desktop software, with that release, VMware View name becomes Horizon View.

VMware View (View Desktop) installed in VMware vSphere ESXi

VMware vSphere used as a platform to host virtual desktops or VMware View; in other words, a user’s desktop computer is running in a virtual machine(view desktop) that provision in ESXi host. They can take full advantage of all the features built into vSphere like VMotion, snapshots, Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and more.

Thin Client

Desktop virtualization takes the user desktop workstations and it is placed on a central server as virtual machines. The user can access them from anywhere using a remote client application, called a thin client. Thin clients can be either a low-cost machine or device which is basically just a monitor, keyboard and mouse, or the application is installed on any types of computers. Because the desktop is hosted on a powerful server that handles all processing for desktops, thin clients do not require a lot of resources and does not need to be that powerful.

See also  How to Power off Unresponsive Virtual Machine on VMware ESXi 4.1

Why you need VMware View Client / VMware Horizon Client

When your desktop infrastructure running in Vmware view, in order to transport a view of the desktop to users, keyboard, video, mouse and other interactions travel over a network connection, you need a software called VMware View Client to be installed in Thin client. In the other word, users establish client connections to virtual machine (View Desktop) sessions that running on ESX/ESXi host by running a VMware View Client on a local host (Thin client). VMware View virtual desktops run on a thin client that uses either a RDP or PCoIP protocol to connect to a virtual machine (View Desktop).

As an alternative to VMware View Client, HTML5 Client for VMware View is available to enable access to VMware View desktops directly from within any HTML5-compatible web browser such as Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox.

VMware View supports both the Microsoft-developed RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) and the Teradici-licensed PCoIP (PC-over-IP) protocol.

VMware View

 

VMware View/Horizon Version release history:

  • VMware View 3.1.3 (May 5, 2010)
  • VMware View 4 (November 9, 2009)
  • VMware View 4.0.2 (September 15, 2010)
  • VMware View 4.5 (September 9, 2010)
  • VMware View 4.6 (February 24, 2011)
  • VMware View 4.6.1 (March 15, 2012)
  • VMware View 4.6.2 (December 11, 2012)
  • VMware View 4.6.3 (March 7, 2013)
  • VMware View 5.0 (September 8, 2011)
  • VMware View 5.0.1 (March 15, 2012)
  • VMware View 5.1 (May 16, 2012)
  • VMware View 5.1.1 (August 16, 2012)
  • VMware View 5.1.2 (December 13, 2012)
  • VMware View 5.1.3 (March 14, 2013)
  • VMware View 5.2 (October 4, 2012)
  • VMware View 5.3 (November 21, 2013)
  • VMware View 5.3.1 (March 11, 2014)
  • VMware View 5.3.2 (June 24, 2014)
  • VMware View 5.3.3 (November 25, 2014)
  • VMware View 5.3.4 (March 17, 2015)
  • VMware Horizon 6.0 (June 19, 2014)
  • VMware Horizon 6.0.1 (September 9, 2014)
  • VMware Horizon 6.0.2 (December 9, 2014)
  • VMware Horizon 6.1 (March 12, 2015)
  • VMware Horizon 6.1.1 (June 4, 2015)
  • VMware Horizon 6.2 (September 3, 2015)
See also  Download VMware Player Free for Windows and Linux

Credit Pictures to blogs.vmware.com and www.escubes.com

1 thought on “What is VMware View / VMware Horizon View”

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.