General support for VMware Horizon 7 ends April 30, 2023, impacting all versions up to and including VMware Horizon 7.13. Read this blog to understand why and how to upgrade to Horizon 8 now: “Top 8 Reasons to Upgrade to VMware Horizon 8.”
VMware Horizon 7 is the premier platform for virtual desktops and applications, and we continually strive to make it even better. Today, we are excited to announce Horizon 7.1. In this release, we innovated in two key areas to raise the bar in delivering a great user experience and change the application delivery paradigm. Let’s dive in.
An Even Better User Experience
Introducing BEAT
While many remote display protocols do a satisfactory job across high-bandwidth and low-latency networks, they degrade considerably under non-ideal conditions. To unleash productivity for mobile and remote workers, the protocol must deliver a great user experience across non-ideal networks. This includes public Wi-Fi or mobile networks, as well as networks across longer transcontinental or intercontinental distances with lower bandwidth, higher latencies and packet loss. That’s where VMware Blast Extreme Adaptive Transport—or BEAT—comes in.
The VMware product teams were hard at work to extend Blast Extreme with an adaptive transport that pushes the user experience envelope even on non-ideal networks. Our engineers designed BEAT from the ground up to provide a cohesive response to both predicted and reported packet loss. To meet this need, they integrated adaptive algorithms with forward error correction and retransmission schemes. This means that BEAT dynamically adjusts to network conditions, including varying speeds and severe packet loss.
So far, our testing shows:
- 6X faster transfers over inter-continental networks (~200 ms latencies, 1% packet loss).
- 4X faster transfers over cross-continental networks (~100 ms latencies, 1% packet loss).
- 50% bandwidth reduction out of the box.
Now, users can access their desktops and applications to stay productive on any device—whether they work on public Wi-Fi at a coffee shop or remotely across the ocean. For a side-by-side comparison, see this short video that compares Blast Extreme without BEAT and Blast Extreme with BEAT on both ideal and non-ideal networks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aRM7n9_tqM&feature=youtu.be
Perhaps the best part is that all of these improvements happen automatically with this release. No manual network analysis or complex configuration is required! Stay tuned for follow-up blogs diving deeper into how BEAT achieves these incredible results.
Skype for Business
At VMworld Europe last year, we announced a new VMware and Microsoft collaboration to enable our joint Horizon and Skype for Business customers with an even better experience. Working together, we created an optimized, direct peer-to-peer endpoint virtual channel that offloads media processing to the endpoints. This avoids excessive bandwidth consumption and load at the data center, delivering a better user experience. See the difference in how the optimized solution works in comparison to the existing solution below:
With the upcoming release of Horizon 7.1, this optimized Skype for Business support will be available as a tech preview for our customers to try hands on.
[Related Live Broadcast: VMware & VDI in Skype for Business, Feb. 10, 9-9:30 a.m. PST]
Just-in-Time Apps
Since our major release last year, customers adopted Horizon 7 at a rapid pace for a reason. Horizon 7 is the first solution powered by JMP, our next-generation delivery platform that includes three key technologies to untangle the operating system, applications and user personalization:
- VMware Instant Clones
- VMware App Volumes
- VMware User Environment Manager
By doing so, all the component pieces reconstitute on demand to deliver Just-in-Time desktops, making it simple for customers to deploy quickly and scale elastically—all while reducing costs.
Customers love this differentiated JMP technology, but also asked us to bring this to published applications. A big driver is that many customers need to deliver critical Windows applications alongside mobile and SaaS apps as a critical component of a modern digital workspace. Many customers are also simply tired of their complex and costly legacy app publishing solution and are ready to switch.
With our latest release, Horizon 7.1 extends Just-in-Time delivery from virtual desktops to applications, bringing increased speed, scale and simplicity to published applications. With Just-in-Time apps, you dramatically simplify deployments with a tightly integrated stack and fewer components.
Independent testing shows the benefits of this technology. You can eliminate half the steps and scale four-times faster compared to the competition without adding extra provisioning servers:
See for yourself how easy it is to deploy RDSH hosts for 2000 users in this video:
https://youtu.be/AjmSY_FOiI4
Now, imagine being able to scale your RDSH hosts to support twice the number users in seconds. Wouldn’t that be great? You can do that with Just-in-Time apps. See how in this short demo video:
Introducing Horizon Apps
Horizon makes apps simple. With the unveiling of Just-in-Time apps in Horizon 7.1, we make this simple to buy, as well. Horizon Apps is a new stand-alone offering focused on published applications. Horizon Apps comes in two editions:
- Standard Edition: Includes app publishing (RDSH apps and session-based desktops), User Environment Manager, VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter. Standard Edition is $125 per named user or $200 per concurrent user.
- Advanced Edition: Includes everything in Standard Edition, plus all JMP technologies for Just-in-Time apps (Instant Clone, App Volumes and User Environment Manager). Advanced Edition is $200 per named user or $325 per concurrent user.
For customers who need published applications but don’t need VDI desktops, Horizon Apps is a great choice.
Time to JMP In
From desktops to apps to user experience, we continue to deliver innovation in our market-leading products. We invite you to see the value delivered in our latest releases. Take a look at some of our resources below for more information:
- Horizon 7.1 and Horizon Apps Overview Video
- Horizon Apps Product Page
- Horizon 7 Product Page
- Principled Technologies Report on Instant Clone Technology
- VMware & VDI in Skype for Business, Live Broadcast on Feb. 10, 9-9:30 a.m. PST
Because you liked this blog:
- The Next Horizon! Introducing Horizon 7.1, Horizon Apps & Horizon Cloud
- Here Comes … Horizon Cloud
- VMware Accelerates Digital Workspace Transformation with New Application and Desktop Virtualization Offerings
