As you may have read we are busy implementing a VMware View environment and have encountered numerous chalenges already.

Most of them have been solved by hard and innovative work or the upgrade from VMware View 3.0.1 to 3.1. Especially the upgrade to VMware View 3.1 resulted in a very good user- and administrator experience.

Unfortunately we kept having performance problems using various desktops (Windows XP or Vista). Scrolling through the Helpdesk tool and browsing web pages with moving graphics like Flash was very shaky even to the extend that desktop sessions froze when to much graphical information had to be processed. This was very strange because at another customer site VMware View worked like a charm with identical sizing but different clients (Wise vs Desktop PC).

A colleague, Anthony Winters, spend a lot of time analyzing these problems. The first thing he found out that performance was poor on the desktop but great on his laptop. He quickly eliminated all variables (network, switches, cabling) until he knew for sure the client was the problem.

Then he analyzed the client and tried several solutions like apply the latest service pack, upgrade Internet Explorer but with no result until he logged on using an administrative account. When he logged on using a local administrator it worked like it should. He suspected that it might be a rights issue but he found out that on other desktops logging on as local administrator didn’t solve the problems.

Then he tried his last option which we all thought was most unlikely to be the source of these problems, the Internet Explorer proxy settings. But it must be Murphy because it solved all performance issues. As it turns out the VMware View client uses the Internet Explorer proxy settings when connecting to the View Connection server. When the proxy settings contain ‘Automatically detect settings‘ and/or the ‘Bypass proxy server for local addresses‘ isn’t setup correctly the VMware View client takes too long to route to and from the VMware View Connection server causing performance to degrade enormously.

So Anthony, great job! You wanted a challenging VMware View case, I think you got it ;-)