VMware launched vSphere 5 this week with the Cloud Infrastructure Suite - it was a massive release with too many features for me to cover in a short article. For the first time here in our part of the world we used a on-line (virtual) conference to launch the product and of course I spent my time in the End User Computing booth. Huge thanks to everyone who logged in to say hi and ask questions (and answer a few for me when I was dropped from a group chat room at one point!)

One question I was asked many times was about performance of PCoIP over the WAN and comparing it to other protocols. One of the big differences with PCoIP is its host rendering which means all the hard work is done on the back end and not the client. Flash, Silverlight, any content is a consistent experience across devices.

Now this is big - I spent ages with one person explaining this - yeah flash may look good if its re-directed to play on the client but think about this as an administrator. To make flash work in Virtual Desktops do you really want to have to use Windows PC's as a client, with large CPU's and the latest flash version installed just to display a remote PC? And what happens if you roam to different devices? Or the version of flash changes? Let alone think about all the other types of media out there.

So to show what I mean one of the guys in the office put this video together (thanks Steve). The video show's PCoIP host rendering verses vector drawing as HDX does when no local redirection is available (Citrix call this adaptive orchestration, but it just means redirection fails). This lab is pretty simple, an iPad 2 going back to a external lab @ about 60m/s latency. The full View VM and XenDesktop VM are on the same vSphere host and cloned from the same Windows 7 desktop image.

The goal here is not to get into a religious debate about protocols but simply to highlight the approach VMware View takes - give this a try yourself!

@desktopguy