VMware View 4.5 includes the following new features

• View Client with Local Mode – Provides the industry’s first integrated offline and server-hosted solution for desktop virtualization, addressing BYOPC use cases.
• Full Windows 7 support – Provides full support for Windows 7. With View 4.5 and ThinApp 4.6, organizations can migrate to Windows 7 at half the cost and time.
• View Client for Mac OS X – Enables Mac users to access hosted Windows virtual desktops, extending the BYOPC use cases to Mac users.
• Integrated Application Assignment – Simplifies the delivery of ThinApp applications to end-users using the View Administrator console.
• Rich Graphical Dashboards – Simplifies management and monitoring through improved reporting and diagnostics.
• Role Based Administration – Distributes IT tasks to the right administrator.
• Integration with Microsoft SCOM and PowerShell – Enables integration into existing management infrastructure to further simplify the management of View virtual desktops, as described in the new VMware View Integration Guide.
• Support for vSphere 4.1 and vCenter 4.1 – Delivers integration with the most widely-deployed desktop virtualization platform in the industry. Takes advantage of optimizations for View virtual desktops.
• Increased scalability – Allows you to deploy 10,000 virtual desktops per pod and use this modular architecture to scale out across your organization. For more information, see the VMware View Architecture Planning Guide.
• Tiered storage support – Reduces the cost and increases the performance of storage by enabling you to take advantage of multiple storage tiers, including high performance and locally attached storage.
• Lowest Cost Reference Architectures – VMware has worked with partners such as Dell, HP, Cisco, NetApp, and EMC to provide prescriptive reference architectures to enable you to deploy a scalable and cost-effective desktop virtualization solution.

Internationalization

View Client and online help for View Client are available in Japanese, French, German, and simplified Chinese. The VMware View Administrator’s Guide, VMware View Installation Guide, VMware View Upgrade Guide, and VMware View Architecture Planning Guide are also available in these languages.

Known Issues

Installation and Upgrade

• You cannot install View Transfer Server on a virtual machine that uses LSI SAS or PVSCSI disk controllers and runs in vSphere 4 or later. If the virtual machine’s guest operating system is Windows 2008, where LSI SAS controllers are configured by default, you must ensure that the virtual machine has the proper disk-controller configuration (BusLogic Parallel or LSI Logic Parallel) before you begin installing the operating system.
• In a linked clone desktop, you cannot uninstall or upgrade View Agent from previous View releases to View 4.5. A View Composer Agent error causes the upgrade installation to fail, and the linked clone virtual machine is left with no View Agent or View Composer Agent, which leaves the virtual machine with no link to the View Composer base image.
  Workaround: Upgrade View Agent to View 4.5 on the parent virtual machine and recompose the linked clone desktop.
  Note: You can upgrade View Agent 4.5, starting with the View 4.5 RC build, to a later View release.
• The version of VMware Tools that corresponds to vSphere 4.0 Update 1 and Update 2 includes driver versions that are incompatible with View desktops. Symptoms can include a black screen instead of correct desktop display.
  Workaround: Install View Agent in the guest operating system after the vSphere 4.0 Upgrade 1 or Update 2 version of VMware Tools is installed. When you install View Agent, it includes the correct versions of drivers.
• When you upgrade View Agent, a Files in Use dialog box appears if an older version of View Agent was previously installed with the PCoIP Smartcard option selected.
  Workaround: In the Files in Use dialog box, click Ignore to continue the installation.
• If you click Cancel during View Client with Local Mode installation while it is copying files, and then run the installer again, the installation will fail.
  Workaround: Reboot the client machine and reinstall View Client with Local Mode. The installation will complete successfully.
• Do not include the space character in the security server password. If the security server password contains a space, security server installation will fail with the message Unable to pair the Security Server with the specified Connection Server.
• If the system locale (set in Control Panel > Regional and Language options > Advanced > Language for non-Unicode programs) does not match the language of the version of Windows that you are using, installation of the View Connection Server does not respond.
  Workaround: Make sure that the system locale matches the language of the version of Windows that you are using.

View Administrator

• When you select a vCenter Server resource pool for a linked-clone desktop pool, View Administrator lets you select a vApp or a resource pool. Linked clones must reside in a resource pool. If a vApp is selected, no linked clones are provisioned and View Composer fails.
• In View Administrator, if you click the Events error or warning icon in the quick status panel, the Events page displays only error or warning events. If you clear the Events filter, all event types are displayed. If you navigate to another View Administrator page and again click the same Events icon in the quick status panel, the Events page displays all event types instead of errors or warnings only.
• In the View Administrator Desktops inventory list, the Starts with filter type does not work correctly when you search by Datastore name.
  Workaround: Use other filter criteria for your search.
• In View Administrator, events are not refreshed automatically for persistent disks. Therefore when you navigate to the Events tab of a persistent disk after detaching or attaching it, you might see the events from a different persistent disk.
  Workaround: Click the Refresh button.
• The number of error and warning events that the View Administrator dashboard displays might not match the number of records that the Events window displays. The dashboard displays the total number of recent warning and error events in the events database. To improve performance, the Events window is limited to displaying a maximum of 2000 records from the event database, and it displays only the warning or error events from this more limited set.
  Workaround: For information about how to perform queries on all records in the event database, see the VMware View Integration Guide.
• In View Administrator, if you enter a non-ASCII DNS server name in the network share path for a ThinApp repository, View fails to access the network path and does not add it as a ThinApp repository.
  Workaround: Create a DNS alias (CNAME) with ASCII characters to point to the server name. Use the CNAME in the network path.
• An authentication error is displayed if a non-ASCII value for the external URL is entered when configuring a View Server in View Administrator.
  Workaround: Use only ASCII characters in the View Server External URL.

View Client

• View Client connections using PCoIP have the following limitations:
  • View clients that use PCoIP can connect to View security servers, but PCoIP sessions with the desktop ignore the security server. PCoIP uses UDP for streaming audio and video. Security servers support only TCP.
  • Audio input works with USB devices only.
• View Agent 4.5 is configured to block local USB-connected BlackBerry devices such as the Curve 8900 and Bold 9700 from being redirected to a remote desktop. This is to prevent an issue where attempting to back up this device causes the guest operating system to fail with a blue screen, and the following message is displayed on the local system: The connection to the remote computer ended.
• If you lock and then unlock the client system while playing a video in the desktop with MMR enabled, playback does not continue. When connected using RDP, View Client stops responding. When connected using PCoIP, you can seek in the media player but there is no video or audio playback. Restarting the media player does not re-enable MMR, and View Client does not close when you disconnect and log off.
  Workaround: You must manually kill the the wswc.exe and vmware-remotemks.exe processes in Task Manager.
• When using RDP and a secure tunnel connection to the desktop, View Client might hang when you stop or pause a video with MMR enabled on Windows clients.
  Workaround: Use a direct connection to the desktop or use PCoIP instead of RDP if you have MMR enabled.
• When certain codecs are installed on the client system and MMR is enabled, View Client might crash when playing a video in Windows Media Player.
  Workaround: Uninstall the codec.
• Authentication might fail if you use RDP to connect to a desktop session that is running a Windows XP guest operating system on a virtual machine with two CPUs. No desktop is displayed and the Windows login dialog reappears. The issue is more likely to occur if you log in several times without rebooting the guest system, or if you are using SSO with View.
  Workaround: Use PCoIP instead of RDP for the connection, or reconfigure the virtual machine to use a single CPU.
• In Windows 7 desktops when connected using PCoIP in Multimonitor display mode, if you choose Show On: Monitor Generic Non-PnP Monitor for any monitor other than the primary monitor in PowerPoint 2010, a black screen is displayed instead of a slide show.
  Workaround: If you are using PowerPoint 2010 in a Windows 7 desktop, you must use Show On: Primary Monitor for a slide show.
• When connected to a Windows 7 or Windows 2008 64-bit View desktop from View Client for Mac OS X, audio does not work.
• When View Client attempts to connect to a Windows 7 desktop using PCoIP, a blank black screen will appear instead of the Windows Security dialog box if the Windows 7 desktop fails to perform single sign-on, for example, if the desktop does not join the domain.
  Workaround: Make sure that you enter a valid user name, password, and domain name in the View Client connection dialog box. When using single sign-on, you do not have to re-enter authentication information to log in to the desktop.
  Once connected, if the Windows Security dialog box is activated in the desktop, a blank screen is displayed. To dismiss the dialog box, press Esc. You can also attempt to type in the correct authentication information, but you cannot see what you are entering.
• If the Enable RDP Auto-Reconnect View Client Configuration group policy is enabled, USB devices are not automatically reconnected to the View desktop after a direct RDP connection to the View Agent is lost. The USB devices are also not available on the client system.
  Workaround: Deselect Connect USB Devices > device to make the USB device available on the client system. Then select Connect USB Devices > device to make the USB device available in the desktop.
• If you redirect a local USB drive to a desktop session, and disconnect or log out of the desktop session while writing data to the drive, an exFAT file system on the drive might be corrupted. You might see an error such as the following when you attempt to write to the USB drive: Error 0x80071AC3: The operation could not be completed because the volume is dirty. Please run chkdsk and try again.
  Workaround: Before you redirect a USB drive to a desktop session, back up the files on the USB drive to another local drive. If the file system on the USB drive does become corrupted, you can try to copy any valuable data from the USB drive to another local drive, although this operation might fail. Reformat the USB drive, and restore the data from the backup copy.
• For some newer USB printers, if the color setting for the printer on the local machine is different from the color setting in the Virtual Printer settings for the View desktop, the local client settings take precedence. For example, if the client computer setting is to print in color but the Virtual Printer setting is to print grayscale, the document is printed in color.
• When playing a video in a Vista desktop, playback controls are not visible if Windows Media Player is in full screen mode.
• Multi-media redirection (MMR) does not play properly in a View Client PCoIP desktop when you connect a projector or external monitor to a laptop computer with certain ATI graphic cards. Sometimes it displays only a black box.
• On Windows Vista systems running View Client, the guest desktop user can access a USB device that is in use on the client system if no locking mechanism is in place. Notepad does not lock a file, whereas Word does.
• If you try to connect to an NLA-enabled Vista machine from an NLA-enabled Windows XP client, the connection fails with the error message An authentication error has occurred (Code: 0x80090303). Remote Computer: <IP.Address>. The same error occurs if you try to connect directly with RDP to the NLA-enabled Vista machine.
  Workaround: You can connect from Windows Vista clients.
• If you are running View Client on Windows Vista build 6.0.6000, you might encounter the following problems:
  • It is not possible to add a printer in the Control Panel.
  • If you try to connect to a desktop using RDP, View Client hangs. The system log will include the error An internal communication error occurred. Redirected printing will no longer function for a single user session. Check the status of the Terminal Services Device Redirector in the System folder of Device Manager.

  Workaround: Upgrade your client system to Windows Vista SP1 or higher.

• If View Client is started from the command line using a command such as wswc.exe -serverURL <IP.Address> -domainName <domain_name>, the user is prompted for a user name and password. If the user waits about 15 seconds and then clicks Cancel, the wswc.exe process remains running until another View Client is launched interactively or from the command line.
  Workaround: Manually stop the wswc.exe process.
• View Client fails to connect to the View security server if a standard server FQDN with localized characters is specified during security server installation.
  Workaround: Specify the IP address of the standard server during security server installation.
• When you are connected to a desktop using the HP RGS protocol, if you right-click a file, folder, or network connection, you might see a red screen and repeated Network connection warning errors. This problem occurs if you right-click an item to select that item and the following settings are turned on:
  • Show Common Tasks in Folders
  • Fade or Slide Menus into View

  Workaround: Workarounds are described in Microsoft KB article 819946 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/819946). Do one of the following:

  • Turn off the Fade or Slide Menus into View visual effect
  • Use Windows classic folders

  Alternatively, select the item before you right-click it. To select an item, either click the item or rest the mouse pointer on the item.

Smart Card

• If you use ActivClient’s smart card removal policy and set it to lock screen, after a client is disconnected and reconnected using PCoIP, a No Reader message appears in the ActivClient agent tray and the desktop is not locked when the smart card is removed.
  Workaround: Use the Windows smart card removal policy instead of ActivClient’s smart card removal policy.
• If you are using smart card credentials to log in and you want to switch protocols, you must log off and log on again.
• If users remove their smart cards while they are logged in, the View desktop exits as expected. However, on busy Windows Vista desktops, the following informational message might be delayed for one or two minutes: Your smart card was removed, so you have been logged out of the View Connection Server.
• Users accessing View Administrator might be prompted to select a certificate (KB 1007609)

View Client with Local Mode and View Transfer Server

• When you first log in to a checked out local desktop, the desktop might display the following error: The are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request. This issue is most likely to occur for a Windows Vista or Windows 7 guest operating system on a full virtual machine from a manual or automatic pool.
  Workaround: Below the error message on the guest desktop, click OK and log in manually. The error does not reoccur on subsequent logins.
• If you are using ESX 3.5, when you check out a desktop and power it on for the first time using View Client with Local Mode, networking might not be ready inside the guest because new network devices are being detected and drivers are being installed. This can cause failures to authenticate to the Active Directory domain controller if cached credentials are not present.
  Workaround: Networking works correctly on subsequent reboots. To avoid this problem, you can first connect remotely before checking out the desktop.
• Do not reconfigure a powered off View Transfer Server using vSphere Client, for example to add memory. Reconfiguration will cause View Transfer Server’s required SCSI controllers to be removed.
  Workaround: Make sure that View Transfer Server virtual machines do not require reconfiguration after they are put into use. If reconfiguration is required, remove and re-add the View Transfer Server from View Administrator. This will require a reboot.

View Composer

• If you edit a pool and switch the datastores on which persistent disks and OS disks are stored, View Composer cannot rebalance linked clones that are affected by the switch.
  For example, you might create a pool and store OS disks on datastore1 and View Composer persistent disks on datastore2. Later, you might edit the pool and select datastore2 for OS disks and datastore1 for persistent disks. The rebalance operation cannot move the OS disks to datastore2 or the persistent disks to datastore1.
  View Composer skips the affected linked clones and rebalances linked clones that are not affected by the switched datastores.
• When you create an automated pool of 100 or more desktops, View Composer does not warn you to limit the prefix name to 12 characters. In an automated pool, desktop names can be no longer than 15 characters, including the prefix name and the autogenerated number. For example, if you create an automated pool with a 13-character prefix and set the maximum pool size higher than 100 desktops, View Connection Server cannot provision more than 99 desktops.
  Workaround: When you create an automated pool of 100-999 desktops, limit the prefix to 12 characters. When you create a pool of 1,000 or more desktops, limit the prefix to 11 characters.
• vSphere optimizes virtual machine cloning by using the SCSI data mover extended-copy feature. However, a side effect of this optimization is that linked clone pool provisioning can be slowed down by concurrent full cloning tasks.
  Workaround: Do not concurrently provision a linked clone pool and a large full clone pool if the two pools are on the same SCSI array, sharing the same data mover. Similarly, do not configure a linked clone pool to share a SCSI array with a full clone pool that uses the delete-desktop-after-logoff policy.
• Linked clones that use BusLogic controllers might become unusable when recomposed to a base image that uses an LSI Logic controller. Linked clones affected by this issue are unable to boot their operating systems, and the administration interface shows errors such as: View Composer agent initialization state error (-1): Illegal state (waited 360 seconds). There is no workaround. Changing SCSI type during a recompose is not a supported operation.
• Sysprep Customized Clones of Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, or Windows Vista Virtual Machines Prompt For Network Location Selection Upon Power On (KB 1008378)

Miscellaneous

• To allow users access to streaming ThinApp application packages, you must set the NTFS permission of the network share that hosts the ThinApp packages to Read&Execute for users.
• If a user enters a non-ASCII View Connection Server name in View Client when connecting to a desktop, the ViewClient_Broker_URL environment variable might not be set on the desktop.
• On Windows 7, if you pin a View Connection Server or View Client desktop session in a jump list and reconnect to it with different connection settings, the item might appear under both Pinned and Recent servers in the jump list.
• Do not set the video RAM size to greater than 30MB. If you do, vMotion will fail. (KB 1011971)

Resolved Issues

Install and Upgrade

• If you are upgrading from View Composer 1.0, when a prompt asks whether you want the wizard to upgrade the database, you must respond that you do want the wizard to upgrade the database. If you select manual upgrade, it will fail. If you are upgrading from View Composer 1.1, no database schema upgrade is required.
• During vSphere upgrade, the administrator might choose to upgrade the virtual machine hardware to version 7 in the parent virtual machine. This can trigger a Windows Vista or Windows 7 reactivation prompt when View desktops are recomposed.

View Client

• If you connect to a Windows 7 desktop using PCoIP, autofit does not work.
• If you connect to a Vista desktop using RDP, but then switch to PCoIP, a blank black screen will appear and then the session will end. This problem only occurs if single sign-on fails.
• The user will see a blank black screen and then the session will end if three conditions occur simultaneously: the remote desktop is running Windows XP SP3, the remote desktop is not joined to an Active Directory domain, and the user reconnects to the same desktop using PCoIP after disconnecting and logging off from the RDP connection.
• When connected to a desktop using PCoIP and playing a video without using MMR, audio might lag behind video.
• MMR does not work if a machine is moved from a workgroup to a domain after the View Agent is installed.
• When connected to a desktop using PCoIP, multiple monitor display does not take effect, or functions poorly, when the leftmost or topmost display is not the primary monitor. For instance, the desktop might be centered across two physical monitors. Also, video might play on the second monitor instead of inside Windows Media Player on the primary monitor.
• When using PCoIP, disable Auto-detect video settings in the video card settings when you create the virtual machine to use as the template or Parent VM for provisioning a desktop pool using the vSphere Client. Otherwise, View cannot set the correct video parameters, and multiple monitor mode fails during provisioning.

View Composer

• If a user data disk runs out of disk space when a persistent linked clone desktop pool is created, recomposed, or refreshed, an error message is displayed: View composer agent initialization state error(20) failed to redirect profiles directory (waited 35 secs).

Miscellaneous

• The first attempt to connect to a desktop that is powered off might fail with the error The connection to the remote computer ended. This can occur when the RDP port has been changed.
• On a View Connection Server instance, when you run Set View Connection Server Log Levels and select log level 0. Reset to installation defaults, the system prints a permission denied error while setting Log4j level to default.

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