Tonight I actually have time to provide something of a technical update so I thought it would be good to spend a few moments and talk about some of the work that I'm doing with the new VMware View product (now called Horizon) v5.2.
VMware published a pretty straight forward document that covers the key differences between 5.1 and the new 5.2 but instead of going through each line of this document, I'd like to focus on the neat features that I've had the privilege of working with.
Some of the key features are:
- Increased scalability
- Increased support on mobile platforms (iOS, Android, etc.)
- Support for Windows 8
- HTML Access via HTML 5 enabled web browsers
- Media services support for unified communications
- Enhanced graphics capabilities
Now my particular favorite new capability is the enhanced graphics supportability. This doesn't just mean the ability to support both DirectX and OpenGL APIs but also means that there is some enhanced performance benefits gained using VMware Horizon View 5.2 over other product currently in operations.
One of the neat thing we did was test virtual software graphics adapters (sSGA) as well as virtual dedicated graphics adapters (vDGA). To accomplish this we were using our compute onboard processing (vSGA) on our server nodes as well as adding dedicated GPUs to each node (vDGA) to test similar desktop workloads (HD video playback, Google Earth, CAD, etc.)
For a complete list of supportability from NVIDIA click here.
So now to the meat and potatoes of our testing. We decided to run similar playback tests using a variety of viewer software applications on each test platform. Each platform consisted of a different VDI offering. Prior to our test we had already narrowed down our selections to one of two solutions (Microsoft or VMware). So our tests involved running on 2008 R2 RemoteFX, 2012 RemoteFX, View 5.1 and View 5.2.
We ran through our gauntlet of tests and in the end (against our initial predictions). View 5.2 out performed using vSGA against all other platforms and delivered us frames per seconds nearly 40% faster than the other platforms tested (even some using vDGA).
Now we're still early in our testing and haven't come up with a final average on our reporting metrics but the initial results look very promising for VMware Horizon View 5.2. My initial gut was actually thinking that Server 2012 RemoteFX with vDGA would blow everyone out of the water but vSGA on 5.2 was slightly better (which I found very surprising).
For further information on Horizon View 5.2 review the Evaluators Guide here.
Thanks for reading!!!
