VMware View 5.0 Release Notes
View version 5.0 | September 2011 | Build: 481677 (View Manager), 481620 (View
Composer)
Last Updated: 8 September 2011
These release notes cover the following topics:
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What's New in View 5.0
Internationalization
Compatibility Notes
Known Issues
Resolved Issues
What's New in View 5.0
VMware View 5.0 includes the following new features:
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PCoIP WAN performance optimization - Improves PCoIP protocol performance in
low-bandwidth WAN environments. Users who connect to their desktops over an
external WAN have enhanced desktop experience.
Support for 3D graphics on vSphere 5.0 - This feature provides View desktops with
vGPU graphics enablement available on vSphere 5.0 platforms. View users can take
advantage of desktop graphics enhancements provided by AERO (such as peek,
shake, and Flip 3D) and the 3D capabilities of Windows Office 2010 (such as picture
editing, slide transitions and animations, presentation-to-video conversion, video
embedding, editing, and 3D rotations).
View Persona Management - The View Persona Management feature manages user
profiles in a secure and centralized environment. (User profiles include user data and
settings, application data and settings, and Windows registry settings configured by
user applications.) View Persona Management allows IT organizations to simplify
and automate the capture and management of a user's persona while providing a rich
user experience. View Persona Management offers the following benefits:
o Provides a user profile that is independent of the virtual desktop. When a user
logs in to any desktop, the same profile appears.
o Lets you configure and manage personas entirely within View. You do not
have to configure Windows roaming profiles.
o Expands functionality and improves performance compared to Windows
roaming profiles.
o Minimizes login impact by downloading only the files that Windows requires,
such as user registry files. Other files are copied to the local desktop when the
user or an application opens them from the local profile folder.
o Copies recent changes in the local profile to a remote profile repository at
configurable intervals, typically once every few minutes.
Updated client certificate checking for View clients - View clients now follow the
well-known browser model for handling certificates, displaying errors detected in the
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certificate presented by View Connection Server, or in the certificate trust chain.
Administrators can set the Certificate verification mode group policy to
enforce strict certificate checking; if any certificate error occurs, the user cannot
connect to View Connection Server. Alternatively, administrators can use the default
Warn But Allow mode, which supports self-signed server certificates and lets users
connect to View Connection Server with certificates that have expired or are not yet
valid. If necessary, administrators can also set a No Security mode that lets users
connect without certificate checking.
Support for vSphere 5.0
Support for hardware v8 - Remote View desktops can be hardware v8 virtual
machines. Hardware v8 is not supported for desktops that run in local mode.
Removed support for HP RGS display protocol
Localization support for Korean. - View Client and the documentation, online help,
and release notes are available in Korean.
Note: The version of View Client for Mac that was bundled with View 4.6 is also bundled
with the View 5.0 release. This is the latest View Client for Mac and is compatible with View
4.6 and View 5.0.
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Internationalization
View Client and online help for View Client are available in Japanese, French, German,
simplified Chinese, and Korean. The following documentation are also available in these
languages: VMware View Administration, VMware View Installation, VMware View
Upgrades, and VMware View Architecture Planning.
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Compatibility Notes
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VMware View 5.0 is supported on the following versions of vSphere:
o vSphere 5.0
o vSphere 4.1 Update 1 or later
o vSphere 4.0 Update 3 or later
For system requirements, see the VMware View Installation documentation.
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Known Issues
The known issues are grouped as follows:
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Installation and Upgrade
View Administrator
View Client and Remote Desktop Experience
Smart Card
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View Client with Local Mode and View Transfer Server
View Persona Management
View Composer
Miscellaneous
Installation and Upgrade
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You cannot install View Transfer Server on a virtual machine that uses LSI SAS or
PVSCSI disk controllers. 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 (LSI Logic Parallel)
before you begin installing the operating system.
In a linked clone desktop, you cannot uninstall or upgrade View Agent from View
4.0.x and earlier releases to View 5.0. 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 5.0 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
Update 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 Smart Card option selected.
Workaround: In the Files in Use dialog box, click Ignore to continue the
installation.
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
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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.
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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 and Remote Desktop Experience
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On 3D-enabled desktops, some users might experience increased latency when
running applications that use native Windows APIs. The problem can be exacerbated
when multiple monitors and the maximum (1920x1200) display resolution are
configured.
Workaround: See In View 5.0, 3D-enabled Windows 7 desktops configured with
multiple monitors at max resolution can have increased latency with certain Windows
applications. (KB 2006611)
When a user presses Ctrl+Alt+Del in a PCoIP desktop session, the Ctrl and Alt keys
are not released on the client host.
Workaround: Press Ctrl+Alt again.
On desktops that connect using PCoIP and are configured with multiple monitors, if a
user plays a slide show in Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 or 2007, specifies a resolution,
and plays the slides on the second monitor, part of each slide appears on each
monitor.
Workaround: On the host client system, resize the screen resolution on the second
monitor to the desired resolution. Return to the View desktop and start the slide show
on the second monitor.
On desktops that connect using PCoIP, if users play slides in Microsoft PowerPoint
2010 or 2007 and specify a resolution, the slides are played at that chosen resolution
and are not scaled to the current resolution.
Workaround: Choose "Use current resolution" as the playback resolution.
Although you can use multiple monitors for View desktops that have Windows XP
and Windows Vista operating systems, some monitor configurations have issues. You
must configure the maximum display resolution correctly. For example, to have a
1200x1920 monitor stacked on top of a 1920x1200 monitor, you must configure the
maximum resolution to accommodate this combined height. A resolution of
2560x1600 would be appropriate in this case. This issue does not occur with
Windows 7 View desktops.
When a large number of desktops are running concurrently, some desktops might
display the following error dialog: "TPAutoConnect User Agent has stopped
working."
Workaround: Restart the TPAutoConnect service. For example:
net stop tpautoconnsvc
net start tpautoconnsvc
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If a user runs Adobe ConnectNow on a View desktop to share the screen with other
users, black frames remain on the screen after the screen sharing begins.
When the PCoIP group policy setting, "Disable sending CAD when users press
Ctrl+Alt+Del," is enabled, the Send Ctrl+Alt+Del option in the Options menu in View
Client does not work. This group policy setting should disable sending CAD only
when users press the Ctrl+Alt+Del keys in the View desktop.
If you use PCoIP connections, audio input works with USB devices only.
If you lock and then unlock the client system while playing a video in the desktop
with multi-media redirection (MMR) enabled, playback does not continue. When
connected using RDP, View Client stops responding. When connected using PCoIP,
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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 wswc.exe and vmware-remotemks.exe
processes in Task Manager.
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.
In Windows 7 desktops when connected using PCoIP in multiple-monitor 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 64-bit View desktop from View Client for Mac OS
X, audio does not work.
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.
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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 gray-scale, 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 graphics 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>.
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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:
o It is not possible to add a printer in the Control Panel.
o 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.
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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.
Smart Card
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On Windows 7 client machines, View Client exits when the smart card removal
policy is triggered.
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.
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Users accessing View Administrator might be prompted to select a certificate (KB
1007609)
View Client with Local Mode and View Transfer Server
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Occasionally with Windows 7 View desktops that have Windows Aero enabled, if
you are using a laptop as a client system and you close the laptop, when you later
open the laptop, the local mode desktop stops responding. Suspending the client
system causes the local mode desktop to freeze.
Workaround: Resize the View Client window or minimize it and then restore it. The
View desktop becomes locked and you can press Ctrl+Alt+Ins to log in again.
If you set an SSO timeout limit for View users, and a user checks out a desktop for
use in local mode, a checkout operation that takes longer than the SSO timeout value
causes the user's SSO credentials to expire. For example, if the SSO timeout limit is
10 minutes, and a checkout takes 20 minutes, the user must log in again to connect to
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the local desktop. Note: By default, SSO is enabled with no time limit. An SSO
timeout limit must be explicitly configured in View LDAP.
Workaround: Extend the SSO timeout limit.
When you first log in to a checked out local desktop, the desktop might display the
following error: There 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.
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 Persona Management
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Files and folders specified as exceptions to the "Files and folders excluded from
roaming" and "Windows roaming profiles synchronization" lists do not show up in
the user's desktop when a user logs in. For example, if you specify folder ABC in the
"Files and folders excluded from roaming (exceptions)" group policy, and set the
"Remove local persona at logoff" group policy, folder ABC does not appear when the
user logs in.
Workaround: Manually create the exception folder on the desktop. View Persona
Management downloads user data from the remote profile repository to the local
folder. This workaround applies only to folders. There is no workaround for
individual files that are configured as exceptions to the "Files and folders excluded
from roaming" and "Windows roaming profiles synchronization" lists.
View Persona Management might not correctly replicate a user persona to the central
repository if the desktop virtual machine is extremely low on disk space.
View Composer
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When you provision linked-clone desktops that are customized by Sysprep, some
desktops might fail to customize.
Workaround: Refresh the desktops. If a small number of desktops still fail to
customize, refresh them again.
If you upgrade a virtual machine with an IDE controller from Windows XP to
Windows 7, take a snapshot of the virtual machine, and create a linked-clone pool, the
linked clones cannot be customized, and pool creation fails.
Workaround: Add a SCSI controller and a disk to the virtual machine. Next, launch
VMware Tools and install a VMware SCSI controller driver on the virtual machine.
Next, take a snapshot and create the linked-clone pool.
Do not change the log on account for the VMware View Composer Guest Agent
Server service in a parent virtual machine. By default, this is the Local System
account. If you change this account, the linked clones created from the parent do not
start.
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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 13character 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 extendedcopy 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
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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.
To ensure that non-English versions of virtual applications that are captured by
ThinApp display the correct language user interface, during the ThinApp capture you
must open the natively installed version on the capture machine before you start the
post-scan operation.
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Resolved Issues
The resolved issues are grouped as follows:
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View Administrator
View Client
Smart Card
View Client with Local Mode and View Transfer Server
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View Composer
Miscellaneous
View Administrator
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Previously, when you selected a vCenter Server resource pool for a linked-clone
desktop pool, View Administrator let you select a vApp or a resource pool. Linked
clones must reside in a resource pool. If a vApp was selected, no linked clones were
provisioned and View Composer failed.
In View Administrator, events were not refreshed automatically for persistent disks.
Therefore when you navigated to the Events tab of a persistent disk after detaching or
attaching it, you might have seen the events from a different persistent disk.
In View Administrator, if you clicked the Events error or warning icon in the quick
status panel, the Events page displayed only error or warning events. If you cleared
the Events filter, all event types were displayed. If you navigated to another View
Administrator page and again clicked the same Events icon in the quick status panel,
the Events page displayed all event types instead of errors or warnings only.
View Client
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When a user logged into a View desktop from one client and then logged in from
another client without logging out, the ViewClient_Machine_Name registry key in the
View desktop sometimes incorrectly retained the value of the first client.
While a screensaver was running on a client machine with an active View desktop
session, when the user typed a keystroke, the client screensaver did not end.
Keystrokes were sent to the View desktop, although the user could not see them.
Previously, when using RDP and a secure tunnel connection to the desktop, View
Client might have hung when you stopped or paused a video with MMR enabled on
Windows clients.
Smart Card
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If you used ActivClient's smart card removal policy and set it to lock screen, after a
client was disconnected and reconnected using PCoIP, a No Reader message
appeared in the ActivClient agent tray and the desktop was not locked when the smart
card was removed.
View Client with Local Mode and View Transfer Server
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Enabling the "Use deduplication for Local Mode operations" setting in View could
cause data corruption in the datacenter copies of View desktops. By default, this
setting was disabled. For more information, see KB 1028195.
View Composer
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If you edited a pool and switched the datastores on which persistent disks and OS
disks were stored, View Composer could not rebalance linked clones that were
affected by the switch.
For example, you might have created a pool and stored OS disks on datastore1 and
View Composer persistent disks on datastore2. Later, you might have edited the pool
and selected datastore2 for OS disks and datastore1 for persistent disks. The rebalance
operation could not move the OS disks to datastore2 or the persistent disks to
datastore1.
View Composer skipped the affected linked clones and only rebalanced linked clones
that were not affected by the switched datastores.
Miscellaneous
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In ESX versions before ESX 4.0 U1, you could not set the video RAM size to greater
than 30MB. If you did, vMotion would fail. (KB 1011971)