VMware is making a determined bid to get a grasp on the desktop virtualization market before competitors Microsoft and Citrix Systems can bring to bear their combined desktop expertise and entrenched advantages.

The result is VMware View 4 announced Monday and generally available Nov. 19 for desktop virtualization.

View 4 invokes a new version of Canadian startup Teradici's PCoIP protocol for PC display over IP networks. From a central server, View 4 can detect the end users network connection, whether a local or wide area network, then deliver a rich, multi-media display to the virtualized desktop.

PcoIP helps VMware overcome the latency that's been inherent in running desktops from virtual machines on central servers. The connection path has to be optimized for user content through the PCoIP protocol in order to give the end user an experience comparable to running his own machine.

Partrick Harr, VP of enterprise desktop marketing, said View 4 reduces the initial capital expense of desktop virtualization, which has been a stumbling block to adoption in the past. It has cost twice as much in capital expense to set up central virtualized servers with desktops and feed displays to end users as it did to simply equip end users with their own machines, he conceded. VMware hasn't cited such a figure in the past. With View 4, the virtualized desktop capital expense has been reduced to a match for the cost of a personal computer, Harr said in an interview.

Much of the gain comes from the greater ability of modern servers to run virtual machines. The reduction in cost is based. in part, on an estimate that the modern virtualized server, such as ones based on Intel Nehalem chips, will be able to run twice as many virtual desktop machines as before.

Each core in a Nehalem chip, also known as the Xeon 5500, not only has a faster clock speed but can run two processes at a time. The improvement is well adapted to the needs of running more virtual machines. Harr claimed instead of a typical eight virtual desktops running on each server core, there will be 16 in the future.

View 4 allows the flexible provisioning of thousands of desktops at a time. Desktops are cloned from a master image, or golden image, on a central server and personalized with settings retrieved for each individual. VMware is following the pattern of rebuilding each individual's desktop at the start of each day from a series of centrally managed parts.

An alternative is to store the entire VM on disk at the end of the end user's day, and reactivate it the next morning instead of rebuilding each day, but that move drives down the savings of desktop virtualization by increasing storage costs.

Under View 4, if the operating system used by thousands of employees needs to be patched, it's patched once on a central server, then distributed with the next creation of each individual's virtual machine. The same process would apply to end user applications, so technicians can upgrade software once at a central server, rather than traveling to each user's desktop and doing a one-at-a-time upgrade.