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VMware gussies up View and Horizon post-PC virty tools

Project Octopus file sharing goes beta

Scaling up View for 10,000 virty PCs

There are a bunch of other tweaks and touches to View 5.1, many of them to help with the management of larger VDI setups with thousands and thousands of seats.

The View Composer tool, which is used to create PC images for VDI streaming, can now be run in its own dedicated server, distinct from the View console itself. The View Connection Server can now log events to a syslog instead of to a database, which also makes it run faster and makes the data available in a format that a big data muncher like Hadoop or the Splunk service can chew on it.

VMware has also boosted the scalability of a single View management domain to up to 32 ESXi hosts using NFS file systems and 8 ESXi hosts using VMFS data stores. Depending on the underlying servers, you can get about 10,000 seats under one View management domain with the enhancements. VMware has explained the scalability enhancements in detail in this blog post by John Dodge, technical marketing lead at VMware.

View 5.1 and Horizon Application Manager 1.5 will be available at the end of the second quarter.

VMware Project Octopus console on Mac

The Project Octopus management console running on a Mac (click to enlarge)

VMware is also moving its "Project Octopus" enterprise-grade file sharing service into full beta, but is not yet talking about when it will be snapped into Horizon and available as a standalone product. VMware is taking time to get the integration right, explained Viarengo.

VMware Project Octopus on Android

Project Octopus file sharing running
on an Android smartphone (click to enlarge)

Viarengo demoed the Octopus file sharing on his own Macbook and Android phone, showing how as he tweaked files, they would be nearly instantly available to the other devices hooked to Octopus. The AT&T network did not have enough coffee that morning, for sure.

VMware gave a sneak peek at the Octopus file sharing service, which is based on the Zimbra email server back-end and file synchronization features of the Mozy file backup service back in August 2011 at VMworld in Las Vegas.

Octopus will have native clients coded for Windows and Mac OS PCs as well as for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets; presumably Windows tablets are also in the works, should they take off in the market with Windows 8. Octopus will also be plugged into View as an external file sharing service for streamed PCs and with be provisioned through Horizon App Manager if IT managers want to lock down access to it on the corporate network.

Odds are, they will. Kiss your Dropbox goodbye and smooch the Octopus. ®

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