COPENHAGEN — At VMworld this week, VMware demonstrated vCenter Operations for View, an upcoming management tool that will allow enterprises that have rolled out virtual desktops to get more insight into how their environment is performing and possible problems.
The goal is to make the rollouts of virtual desktops based on VMware’s View platform more straightforward and, in the end, successful, according to Robert Baesman, group product manager at VMware. Today, some users run into storage performance roadblocks that could be avoided if they had more visibility into their environment, he said.
Just like the regular version of VMware’s Operations Manager tool, the version for View will have an interface that can be customized, according to Baesman.
The user interface showed at VMworld took a top-down look at a virtualized desktop environment, showing how storage, user desktops, the View and the vSphere infrastructure had performed during the last six hours.
But an administrator will also be able to start from the bottom up, with a user that has reported a problem. The administrator would, in this scenario, start by searching for the user, and then take a closer look at all the parts of the infrastructure that can impact his performance, including PC over IP (PCoIP), the protocol used by VMware to distribute server-based application to a client.
Operations for View will take advantage of performance counters — which can be used to measure latency and throughput — that VMware added in version 5 of the View platform.
Today, the tool is still under development, and is only available as a tech preview. VMware isn’t ready to say when it will start shipping. The same goes for how the tool will be packaged, Baesman said.
