VMware announced View 5.1, plans to deliver seamless apps via PCoIP and full desktops via HTML5

[UPDATED MAY 4] Corrected info about how the View Storage Accelerator Works

Today VMware released the details of the next version of View, called version 5.1. (They also announced thatHorizon App Manager is available for on-premises deployments and that Octopus is available in public betaform. Jack Madden covered both of these stories on ConsumerizeIT.com today.)

In terms of major features, there's not a lot new for View 5.1. The main new thing is that vSphere's Content Based Read Cache is now available for View, (though with desktops they call it "View Storage Accelerator" (VSA) for some reason). Originally slated for View 5.0 and pulled at the last minute, View Storage Accelerator uses RAM on the VDI host to cache frequently used disk blocks. This provides better experience with fewer read operations going to the primary storage. [UPDATE] This cache is based on the content of the disk blocks, so if it finds any blocks that are the same, it can consolidate them in the cache. This means that in addition to being able to cache the "master" copies of Linked Clones, it can cache identical blocks from random personal VMDK desktop files. This is huge, and a topic I'll cover more in the future. [END UPDATE]

Anyway, VSA is probably the biggest new feature of View. They also announced that you can use View Persona for physical machines, but they stressed the main use case for this is for migrations from OSes or migrations to VDI. (The way Persona works today prevents a user from being logged into two desktops at once with it anyway, so it's not like Persona is getting anywhere near AppSense or RES yet.)

Finally, there's now a View desktop version of vCenter Operations. First announced at VMworld Europe last year, vCenter Operations for View does pretty much what you'd expect it to—real time monitoring and health checking of View environments. The new View version includes the ability to dig into PCoIP performance—something that's been a bit of a black box in the past.

--> Please see the rest on the blog : http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/brianmadden/archive/2012/05/02/vmware-announced-view-5-1-plans-to-deliver-seamless-apps-via-pcoip-and-full-desktops-via-html5.aspx