Riverbed Technology, the application performance outfit, has some new solutions developed in collaboration with its buddy VMware that are supposed to provide a reliable and consistent desktop virtualization end-user experience in organizations that deploy VMware's Horizon View 5.2.

The experience is supposed to be seamless regardless of where the data is.

The partnership between Riverbed and VMware has resulted in the support of several Riverbed performance solutions in Horizon View deployments, including certifying Riverbed's Granite widgetry for acceleration, control and management in virtualized desktop initiatives.

Organizations that deploy Horizon View with Riverbed performance jumpers are supposed to be able to achieve a more automated, flexible, scalable and high-performing VDI environment. And those that want a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) can reduce complexity.

Granite, which went into preview last August, is now VMware Ready with Horizon View 5.2 smoothing the way for high-performance remote and branch office virtual desktop deployments, ensuring VMware support for customers who use the combined solution.

Granite lets organizations overcome the limitations of wide area networks when delivering virtual desktops to remote locations such as limited bandwidth, latency and unforeseeable outages. Together with VMware's View Branch Office Desktop (BOD) and Business Process Desktop (BPD), Granite is supposed to deliver a high-quality Horizon View user desktop experience while preserving consolidation and control in the data center.

Riverbed offers a QoS solution for PCoIP that delivers fine-grained control of Horizon View virtual desktop traffic. The combination of WAN optimization and the ability to prioritize PCoIP at a granular level along with other traffic that traverses the same WAN is supposed to help organizations achieve the appropriate balance between desktop virtualization and business applications.

Figure, say, 30%-40% better performance.

Riverbed's new Stingray Traffic Manager integrated with Horizon View provides acceleration, business continuity, fine-grained application-level control and high availability for end users that need constant access to their desktops, applications and data from any device or location.

Stingray offers global load balancing (GLB), secure socket layer (SSL) offload and TrafficScript, a programming language used to create rules to address problems like security vulnerabilities, application bugs or application incompatibilities.

Released last October, Cascade 10.0 delivers network performance management in Horizon View environments, giving organizations the ability to pinpoint, understand and troubleshoot in VDI environments. It makes the PCoIP protocol visible for actions such as screen refresh, print and type, which are critical for troubleshooting and optimizing the use and performance of interactive applications in Horizon View environments.