I just discovered an unadvertised new feature with View 5, that I felt was worthy of taking some time to break my four month drought of blog posts. (Yeah, before VMWorld. What can I say, I've been busy). What shocked me is that this is a feature that my customers almost always ask about. The feature is the ability to shadow a View user in a PCoIP session. There are several tools that can do this (VNC and the like), but they're all third-party options that may or may not have a cost or additional infrastructure associated with them. It only makes sense that View should have this option since they've got the protocol built deep into the product, not to mention a remote console to the actual display adapter in the form of the vSphere Client.
The option is "Enable access to a PCoIP session from a vSphere console" and is (barely) documented here in the
View 5.0 Documentation.
Before configuring the GPO and applying to the vDesktop OU, here's what the View console and the vSphere remote console looked like:
After enabling the GPO and doing a gpupdate /force, here's what they look like:
Both show the exact same movements, and both accept input.
Now, if only VMware & Terradici put some programmer hours around securing and integrating this into the View Administrator...