VMware, the struggling virtualization leader, has, as expected, put View 3 on the market to do battle with Citrix' XenApp and XenDesktop widgetry.

It's supposed to be a big advance in virtual desktop computing, described by the company as a major step in its vClient Initiative, which was announced in September and is due next year and is supposed to solve the "desktop dilemma" over whether to provide employees with thick or thin clients.

View 3, a reworking of VMware's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, is supposed to address this dilemma by combining the benefits of both approaches - delivering rich, personalized virtual desktops to any device thick or thin.

It effectively decouples a desktop from specific physical devices or locations and creates a personalized view of a user's desktop, applications and data - called cleverly enough myView - that's securely accessible from almost any device at any time.

These virtual desktop images are hosted in the datacenter using VMware's flagship Infrastructure 3 and of course IT can then provision and manage thousands of virtual desktops more simply and at a substantially lower operating cost.

View 3 is actually a family of products available in two editions: an Enterprise Edition, priced at $150 per concurrent connection, and a Premier Edition, priced at $250 per concurrent connection.

The Enterprise Edition includes VMware Infrastructure Enterprise Edition and View Manager 3, a new version of the company's connection broker that used to be called VMware Desktop Manager or VDM.

The high-end Premier Edition includes VMware Infrastructure Enterprise Edition, View Manager 3, ThinApp for agent-less application virtualization, and View Composer, a new product for creating multiple virtual desktops from a single image, which increases the speed of provisioning desktops and reduces storage requirements.

VMware thinks Composer is hot stuff.

It uses VMware's so-called Linked Clone snapshot technology to create virtual desktops from a master image while reportedly consuming up to 70% less storage space. Automated image preparation and provisioning reportedly take only seconds and are centrally controlled by View Manager.

Composer reduces management costs since thousands of individual virtual desktops can be updated just by updating the master image with a patch or application update, then cloning the master image to each desktop.

VMware says Composer does this one-to-many image updating while preserving user data, settings, and preferences so patching is seamless to end users and the differences become more manageable.

The VMware ThinApp bundled with View 3 simplifies application packaging and deployment to a virtual desktop environment. It enables applications to run independent of the host operating system version or patch level, which makes updating and patching easier and reduces storage requirement by centralizing and compressing apps.

According to Jocelyn Goldfein, who runs its Desktop Business Unit, VMware is redefining what's possible with desktop virtualization.

View 3, which only supports Windows, is meant to increase the scalability and richness of virtual desktops while reducing management time and costs.

Other new View Manager 3 features such as virtual printing, multimedia redirection, offline desktop and brokering Windows Terminal Services sessions are supposed to improve the virtual desktop experience."

The offline desktop widgetry, which is still experimental and unsupported, moves the user's virtual desktop back and forth between the datacenter and his laptop or desktop. He doesn't have to be connected to the network to use it. Then he can use local resources that he might not otherwise have for more demanding apps.

Unified access gives desktop administrators a single management platform for multiple types of sessions: desktop environments hosted on VMware Infrastructure, user sessions running on Windows Terminal Servers, or physical PCs such as a blade PC.

Virtual printing means end users can print to any local or network printer without installing drivers.

Multimedia redirection, which comes complements of Wyse Technology's TCX mojo, is supposed to improve the user experience with rich multimedia playback. The multimedia processing is redirected from the server to the end-user device where the multimedia stream is decoded, taking advantage of the local processing power.

To get partners building practices around VMware View 3, VMware has launched an Enterprise Desktop Competency program to train them.