A Longer-Term VMware Horizon Platform for Mission-Critical Desktop and App Workloads
A substantial number of customers deploy the VMware Horizon desktop and app virtualization platform to deliver mission-critical desktops and apps (e.g. electronic medical record software, like Epic). For these customers, upgrading Horizon can be quite resource-intensive and requires long-term planning. So ideally, these customers would like to remain on the same version of Horizon for a long period of time and still receive timely bug and security fixes.
To better meet the needs of these customers, VMware will be offering a new Extended Service Branch (ESB) for VMware Horizon 7 Enterprise deployments, which include the core Horizon 7 platform, VMware App Volumes, and VMware User Environment Manager.
An Extended Service Branch is a parallel release branch to the existing, current release (CR) of the product. By choosing to deploy an ESB, customers will receive periodic service pack (SP) updates, which include cumulative, critical bug fixes and security fixes. Most importantly, there will be no new features in the SP updates, so customers can rely on a stable Horizon platform for their critical deployments.
For Horizon Enterprise suite, there will be separate ESBs for Horizon 7, App Volumes, and User Environment Manager. These ESBs will be released once a year (at the same time). Once released, these will be supported for 24 months. During those 24 months, there will be three scheduled SP updates: SP1 will be released six months after the initial release, SP2 will be released three months after SP1, and SP3 will be released six months after SP2.
The first set of ESBs will be available in the Q2 2018 timeframe. ESBs will be covered under the same licenses that govern the existing Horizon releases.
For more information, please review these FAQs about Horizon 7, App Volumes, and User Environment Manager ESBs.
