The September 2018 release of Horizon Cloud is now live! We will be rolling out this update in the next few weeks. Watch for a notification in your Horizon Cloud console that the update is available and ready for you to schedule.
Horizon Cloud Service on Microsoft Azure
There are several new service updates to be aware of in this release.
Horizon Cloud Service Updates
We are establishing a new Control Plane instance for Horizon Cloud Service on Microsoft Azure in Australia, including support of Australia Central regions, which are primarily used by government agencies.
We have added many error-reporting and troubleshooting capabilities. These enhancements demonstrate how the product has matured. Even though Horizon Cloud Service on Microsoft Azure has proven to be extremely easy to deploy, we still strive to make product deployment even simpler. To that end, we have been noting where deployment hang-ups occur, or where misconfiguration of the platform can cause issues in deployment, and we are providing more information to you, our customers, so that you can solve problems without needing to open a support case.
Another feature that was added as a result of customer feedback is the ability to have an internal-network Unified Access Gateway configuration. This allows end users who access their desktops and applications internally, over their VPN/Express Route, to use the Horizon HTML Access web client.
Finally, Workspace ONE Cloud (SaaS) Identity Manager can now be deployed during the Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure onboarding process and is included as part of the Horizon Cloud license. This provides VMware Identity Manager with a means of delivering a single access point for end users to connect to their desktops and applications, with SSO (single sign-0n) and multi-factor authentication functionality.
Horizon Cloud VM Support Enhancements
With this release, we have added support for Windows 10 1803, and allow several new Microsoft Azure virtual machine types for use as VDI and RDS-based VMs.
VDI virtual machine types added:
- F-Series
- Ev3 Series
- Dv3 Series
RDS-based virtual machine types added:
- Ev3 Series
- Dv3 Series
Please see Sizes for Windows virtual machines in Azure for more details on these VM types in Microsoft Azure.
Additionally, we now support the use of Azure encrypted disks for VDI desktops in Horizon Cloud. Of course, with the added work of the encrypting and decrypting disks, you will see some additional CPU overhead when you use this feature.
Last but not least, we have added a feature that allows you to optimize any VM that you deploy from the Azure Marketplace. Image optimization can often be an arduous task, requiring a lot of time to optimize each different standard image you plan to deploy. With this release, when you deploy a VM from the Azure Marketplace, you have the option of automatically disabling and removing some configuration items at image deployment time. The idea is to simplify image management by incorporating configuration best practices during image creation, thus aiding in standardization across environments.
To learn more, watch this short What’s New Overview video.
