VMware has unveiled the latest version of its ESX-based virtualization software to capitalize on Microsoft’s rollout of Windows 7.
The company has launched VMware View 4.0, featuring a new communications protocol called PC-over-IP to provide real-time screen rendering, plus the ability to deploy and manage tens of thousands of virtualized desktops without the need for custom engineering.
Planned for the first-half of 2010, meanwhile, is a native hypervisor so that PCs can run offline, using the machine’s local resources, and then synchronize when re-connected to the network.
View 4.0 will come in two flavors – enterprise and premier, priced $150 and $250 per concurrent user. The former features vSphere, vCenter, and View Manager, while the latter features these plus View Composer for single-image management and storage and application virtualization and ThinApp 4 for working on thin clients.
VMware believes the changes will bring desktop virtualization to a mass market of power users in addition to more traditional types in call centers through the addition of things like PC-over-IP.
