Employee Experience

Technical Overview of the Horizon Air Summer 2015 Service Update

By Simon Le Comte, Sr. Manager Horizon Air Architects Team, EUC, VMware

We’re excited to have announced the Summer 2015 update to Horizon Air. For the Summer 2015 update, we really wanted to focus on enhancing the user experience and improving IT administration time. Let’s take a look at the new features.

Next Generation Admin Console

The new “Administration Console” is now cleaner, faster and allows for easier workflows so that administrators can achieve more in less time. Key new features include:

  • More efficient deployment tasks
  • Easier administration of your deployment
  • Expanded reporting and monitoring
  • Application and desktop assignment workflow improvements
  • Automatic registration of RDSH remote applications in an application catalog

horizon air console

HTML Access for RDSH Remote Applications

With this new feature, end users are no longer required to download a client to access RDSH Remote Applications. They can simply use an HTML5 compliant browser. Not only can users easily switch between applications via the sidebar, they can also copy and paste between HTML Applications. This provides the ultimate flexibility for use of unmanaged devices using a HTML browser for access.

horizon air rdsh

Client Drive Redirection

Have your end users needed to access a file from their local device in their virtual desktop or remote application only to have to use a 3rd party cloud storage service like DropBox or one drive? VMWare Horizon Air Users can now access their local files from within their virtual desktop or remote application’s file explorer window – its that simple. Client drive redirection is natively supported on Windows Client endpoints and in Tech Preview for Mac Clients. Drive redirection has been one of the most requested end user features to date and VMware has made this a reality! As the Admin, you control whether this feature is available to your end users.

horizon air client

Horizon Air Helpdesk Portal

Horizon Air Helpdesk Portal enhances the administrator’s ability to troubleshoot VM issues and is particularly useful if the VM is inaccessible via regular PCoIP or BLAST connection:

  • Console Access to VMs and Gold Patterns allows the admin to interact with the VM without the need for any pre-loaded connection software.   You can view everything from the moment the VM powers on, and log in as a local admin to troubleshoot and fix any issues.
  • VM Health Check evaluates the VMs and Gold Patterns to ensure their services and registry settings are configured correctly and will not interfere with the user experience. (for example: ensuring all agents and services are running, and the VM’s sleep policy is turned off)

Today this is an early adopter feature and not official GA. Given how widely requested this feature has been historically, we are turning it on for all customers both for internal and remote access to this portal.

PLEASE NOTE: If you have 2 Factor Authentication (2FA) enabled in your account, please inform our deployment services team so that we may disable remote access to this portal as it does not support 2FA at this time.   You will still be able to access the helpdesk portal from your internal network.

Serial Port Redirection

This feature is for customers looking to leverage specialty accessories such as Point of Sale devices (bar code scanners as an example). When a user is connected via PCoIP to a Virtual Desktop their serial port can be redirected from the local machine to their virtual machine. This allows users to natively use serial devices with their session and removes the need to for a user to have a USB to Serial port adapter on their end point. Serial port redirection can be configured via Microsoft Group Policy using the “vdm_agent_serialport.adm” template.

PLEASE NOTE: Note that many serial port devices are latency sensitive and not guaranteed to operate in a cloud environment over a Wide Area Network.

horizon air redirection

Chrome OS Client

With BYOD adoption taking off, we’re seeing more and more organizations adopt Chromebooks, so VMware has released the Horizon Client for Chrome OS. With the new Horizon Client, a user can connect via PCoIP, leverage Unity Touch sidebar with remote applications, take advantage of an on-screen keyboard, copy & paste, easy switching between applications, and more!

horizon client support

iOS 64bit Support

VMWare has added support for 64-bit processors on newer Apple devices so that users can embrace the rich user experiences delivered from the new 64-bit Apple endpoints. This includes iPhone 5S, 6, 6plus, iPad Air, Air 2 and more.  This update ensures that the VMware Client on iOS is able to leverage the full processing power of the latest iOS devices.

iphone

As you can see the service update has greatly enhanced the capabilities to the end user but also streamlined IT administration to deliver more value to our customers. To learn more about VMware Horizon Air, please visit our website at www.vmware.com/go/daas.

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