By Shankar Iyer, vice president of product management, End-User Computing, VMware
I’m excited to be at VMworld once again and as always, it’s a thrill to meet the VMware community of customers, partners and end-users. VMware End-User Computing made several product announcements today and I’d like to walk you through the details behind the new updates related to our desktop and application delivery solutions.
But before we begin, let me proudly say again that VMware was recognized as a leader in the Virtual Client Computing Market by IDC based on our innovations in Horizon 6, especially over the last year. This was a huge accomplishment by the VMware End-User Computing development team and a testament to our continued commitment to innovation.
VMware Project Enzo
We announced Project Enzo a few months ago as a new way of delivering virtual desktops and applications using cloud-scale architecture and management. We are pleased to announce that we’ve continued to make progress on Project Enzo and will be accepting nominations from customers for a new beta program that will begin this quarter. Please visit us in many of the VMworld sessions and the VMware booth to learn more.. Also, Shawn Bass’ blog post describes some of the architectural elements of Project Enzo and how it’s different from other solutions in the market so I recommend reading his post to learn more.
VMware Horizon 6.2 – Multiple Advancements That Improve Apps-at-Scale and User Experience, Among Other New Capabilities
VMware Horizon 6.2 builds on the foundation of Horizon 6 and will deliver better scalability and availability, a richer user experience, improved optimization for VMware’s Software Defined Datacenter, enhanced security and new federal government readiness.
VMware Horizon 6.2 will deliver applications at scale with new features to make the deployment and management of RDSH applications easier and more scalable. View Composer with Linked Clones will allow you to simply deploy and quickly update your entire RDSH farm. Load balancing improvements will allow you to balance applications based on various load metrics (CPU or memory usage) and will include an extensible interface to balance RDSH hosts based on metrics. The solution will also integrate Horizon Apps into the Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA) to allow virtual machines to scale between sites and between datacenters.
VMware Horizon 6.2 will also deliver a richer and more seamless user experience for apps and desktops.
Delivering rich 3D desktops and apps has never been easier. VMware Horizon 6.2 together with NVIDIA GRID cards will deliver high-end 3D graphics applications with RDSH in addition to 3D VDI desktops. VMware Horizon 6.2 will add support for NVIDIA GRID and NVIDIA GRID 2.0. NVIDIA GRID 2.0, based on NVIDIA’s award winning Maxwell architecture, will offer higher user density with higher performance to more platforms. The solution will support 4K (3840×2160) high resolution desktops and Linux desktops. Finally, vDGA pass through graphics will be extended to support select AMD FirePro GPUs for Windows VDI desktops.
It will be easier to work with local files too, with VMware Horizon 6.2. With VMware Horizon 6.2, hosted applications will be easier than ever to use with support for File Type Association with Windows clients, making it easy to open a file with a remote app right from the Windows Explorer. Client Drive Redirection, which allows easy access to files on your computer, will be extended with encryption for greater security, along with new support for Mac clients. In addition, Linux client support will be available as a tech preview.
There will also be communication improvements. VMware Horizon 6.2 will support the Skype for Business messaging application (formerly known as Microsoft Lync) on several Windows platforms including Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 2008 R2, Windows 2012 R2 with Windows 10 desktops, and RDSH desktops running on Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 2012 R2 Servers.
VMware Horizon 6.2 with latest Horizon Client 3.5 for iOS will also offer the option of using Touch ID for easy login to your apps or desktops. Once enabled by the administrator, end-users can enjoy amazing one-touch access when using an iPhone or iPad.
Oh, did I forget Windows 10? Windows 10 is fully supported across the entire VMware Horizon portfolio including Horizon clients, desktops and hosted applications. . This day 0 support of Windows 10 continues our commitment to offering compatibility with the latest innovative technologies. With Windows 10 desktops running on VMware Horizon virtual desktops, end-users have full access to the features and functionality available from Windows 10 and VMware Horizon.
VMware Horizon 6.2 is also optimized for the VMware SDDC environment and already supports the latest release of vSphere – vSphere 6 U1. We leverage the new all-flash Virtual SAN to support double the number of users at the same cost, double your density, and supports over four thousand users per cluster. You can take advantage of the vSAN stretched cluster technology to deploy Horizon across multiple sites.
There will be more security in VMware Horizon as well. VMware Horizon 6.2 includes a hardened appliance to secure access to the Horizon infrastructure from outside the corporate firewall. Integration with VMware Identity Manager, included with Horizon Advanced and Horizon Enterprise, will provide end-users with secure, customizable access to resources using an expanding set of authentication sources including two-factor and bio-metric fingerprint authentication.
For federal government customers, the solution will also be compliant with the FIPS 140-2 regulation for security .
But new features don’t end there. VMware User Environment Manager (UEM) 8.7, included with Horizon Enterprise, will fully support Windows 10 and will offer even greater efficiency for dynamic updates to the mobile user environment. It will also be able to detect a wide range of connections including PCoIP, Blast, RDP, and Citrix. VMware User Environment Manager natively supports policies based on client name and IP for VMware Horizon connections with improved application profiling. Administrators will have greater visibility and new tools for analysis to understand when and where UEM settings are applied.
There will be new advancements in VMware Horizon for Linux as well. VMware Horizon for Linux will support NVIDIA GRID 2.0 to deliver shared and scalable 3D graphics to Linux users with up to 4 displays. VMware Horizon 6.2 for Linux will also offer support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1.
Update on VMware Project Fargo
Many of you have asked about bringing the power of instant cloning (Project Fargo) to VMware Horizon and we’re glad you are just as excited as we are about the technology. We are actively working on utilizing the power of Project Fargo and applying it to a desktop provisioning model, including Project Enzo, and there will be more to come on this, so stay tuned.
VMware Horizon Air Expands in North America and Supports Windows 10
VMware Horizon Air continues to grow globally and will expand its services to Canada this quarter. VMware Horizon Air supports Windows 10 so customers can benefit from the CAPEX savings that a cloud-hosted service provides, in addition to trying the new features available in Windows 10.
As you can see, VMware Horizon 6.2 will introduce many new features – much more than its version number implies. So if you’re curious, come by the VMware booth or attend one of the VMware Horizon sessions to see for yourself and learn more. I look forward to seeing old friends and making new ones at the show.
