Over the Christmas holiday I had the opportunity to read a book on VMware View by Pearson Education Inc/VMware Press.
The title of the book is "VMware View 5 - Building a Successful Virtual Desktop" by Paul O'Doherty.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who does not know this subject at all, and to those who are working with Virtual Desktop.
This
book is very easy to read with a lot of screen captures to make the
subject clear as if the reader were standing behind a terminal watching a
live demonstration - this is what I like most.
The organization of the chapters is very logical. The author presents
the subject from top to bottom. It gives a generic definition and
explanation of what a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is and then goes
into how VMware provides a solution for Virtual Desktop from an
architectural point of view and then goes further into VMware View's
implementation. The
author, then, talks about Application virtualization in general and
then what ThinApp is and how is is implemented by VMware. The reader is taught how to build a virtual desktop infrastructure and is shown the operation and management of a VMware view infrastructure.
The topic of end user experience is particularly interesting to me since
I am also working with Citrix's XenApp. Back in View 4's era, I heard
from people who had experience with both Vmware View and XenDesktop that
VMware is still not as good as Citrix in the area of user experience. I
believe this has changed with View 5 (I think mostly is due to the
improvement on PCoIP). The author finally explains Performance and Monitoring, which this is an important topic for Virtual Desktop administrators.
One
thing I am not sure is how this book functions with respect to taking
the VCP5-DT exam. When I took the VCP5-DV exam, I went by the exam
objectives. It seems as if the organization of this book is more for
functional use and not for an exam. Personally, I feel that by
understanding the concepts explained in this book, will not be enough to
pass the exam.
