Hi, Andy here again.
You’ll be happy to know that that we’ve kept to our quarterly promise, and shipped another major release of FLEX. VMware Horizon FLEX 1.6 shipped at the beginning of September. And it’s a doozy.
The headline is that it’s Apple OS X El Capitan ready, and built for Windows 10 and Cortana. But the devil is in the details and there’s lots of details in this release.
The Windows support is, of course, for both host and guest.
Horizon FLEX currently relies on Fusion Pro and Player Pro as its type 2 hypervisors, and they too have undergone a major rebuild. The first thing that you’ll notice is that Player Pro is now called Workstation Player. It’s cosmetics, but it makes the Personal Desktop brand more consistent.
The new clients now have support for Windows DirectX 10 and OpenGL 3.3. Our DirectX10 support returns 15X faster benchmark than our DirectX 9, which is quite something. However, our OpenGL engine clocks in with a whopping 65% performance increase.
In addition to that you can now take advantage of up to 16 vCPUs, 64Gb of RAM, 8 TB disks, and up to 2GB of video RAM per FLEX virtual machine. Dream bigger! (As Steve once said.)
The ready for El Capitan support also makes you ready for the latest Apple hardware, with improved battery life, force touch pass-through, 5K Retina support, and improved multi-display support for those of you that like stacking this stuff up.
Those FLEX virtual machines will also suspend and resume 3 times faster, make clearer Skype and Lync VoIP calls, and benefit from improved USB 3.0 support.
For those of you rolling our virtual machines to large groups of people, we’ve added per VM download URL entitlement, and allowed users to have multiple copies of the same VM on their machine if needed (handy for developers!
There lots more packed in to this release but I suggest that rather than reading about it, you go and actually touch it. Have you tried our free Hands On Lab where you can play with FLEX? You should. Then you should tell people about it on our Community page.
Have fun, and thanks for reading.
