To meet the demand for hosted applications, VMware Horizon 6 supports an app-remoting option based on Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS). The “Application-Delivery Options in VMware Horizon 6” whitepaper describes this new option, as well as additional application delivery options available in Horizon 6.

You can publish and manage RDS-hosted applications through Horizon with View in the Horizon Advanced Edition and Horizon Enterprise Edition. That includes setting policies and entitlement.

You can also integrate VMware Workspace with View, which enables you to present your hosted applications in Workspace, where they are displayed alongside applications from ThinApp repositories, Citrix XenApp farms and software-as-a-service (SaaS) and web application providers.

RDS is the Microsoft architecture that supports the use of remote machines and applications through a network connection. The application-hosting option in Horizon 6 provides the essentials for publishing applications based on RDS. You can install one instance of an application on an RDS host instead of on multiple individual desktops, and make that application available to many end users.

The whitepaper summarizes the straightforward process of hosting an application via RDS. In just a few steps, you can publish an application on an RDS host and entitle users to access it in View, and then sync to display it in Workspace. The following outline will give you an idea of how easy RDS hosting is in Horizon 6.

Publish an Application by Hosting on an RDS Server

1. First , you select an RDS host. Using the Inventory navigation pane in View, you click the RDS Hosts tab, and select an RDS farm. In the following screenshot, an RDS host was previously set up and registered with View. The host is part of an RDS farm, a collection of RDS hosts based on the set of applications served. In this screenshot, the host is OFF2K13_1.
2. Next, you locate the application pool where applications are managed, using the Inventory navigation pane on the left. In the following screenshot, the application pool already has some Office 2013 applications in it. You now click Add to publish a new application.
3. In the Add Application Pools window, you select the Select installed applications radio button, and select your application from those listed. We used Calculator for this example, but the process works the same for any application that you want to publish. You then click Next.
4. View automatically provides an ID and a friendly display name that you can modify. You can select the check box to entitle users after this wizard finishes, or wait until later. After verifying that everything is accurate, you click Finish.
5. That is all there is to it! The application is now published on the RDS host and ready for entitlement in View.

Provide Entitlement

1. If you selected the check box to entitle users after the wizard finishes, then View automatically opens the entitlement window so you can immediately entitle the appropriate users. If you did not select this check box, you can simply click the Entitlements tab in Application Pools to bring up the Add Entitlements window. You click Add to select the users or groups that you want to entitle to access this newly published application.
2. In the Add Application Entitlement window, you provide the required domain and user or group name, and click Next.
3. The newly hosted application now appears in the Application Pool with entitlements complete.
4. Voilà! The application is now installed on the RDS host and end users are entitled to access it. The next time these end users launch their Horizon Clients, the newly published RDS-hosted application will be available.

Workspace Access

1. In order for your users to access the application from Workspace, as well as from View, you now need to sync. In Workspace, you log in as an administrator, navigate to View Pools, and click Sync Now.
2. After the sync has completed, you can verify and save the changes. Workspace now displays the icon of the application that you just published. The end user sees the new icon directly in the Workspace user interface, which is pre-populated with the fully qualified domain name of the RDS host. For your end user, the icon is available in Workspace without the appearance of going through View or through a View desktop. And regardless of the device, your end user always finds this application in the same place, providing a consistent user experience:
3. When you see how effective VMware Horizon 6 is for making applications of all types available to your end users, you will want to know more. See the Application-Delivery Options in VMware Horizon 6.0 white paper for more information about the combination of application-delivery options, as well as use cases where each option is most beneficial.

You can also find out more about Horizon 6 by

• Watching a live demo
• Downloading a free trial
• Reading more