Back in August, we made a big announcement for Horizon—the debut of VMware Horizon 8! Today, I want to highlight one of the new features: support for Linux published apps. We think this is really going to help out a lot of customers.
Horizon and Linux
Horizon offers multiple options to customers who are remoting Windows. You can set up full VMs, offering stability and independence; or you can run RDSH, with the promise of greater density. You can set up your end users with full, immersive desktops that are running on vSphere, RDSH or perhaps even Azure. Or end uses can work with remote applications running seamlessly with their native applications, again backed by a range of platforms. It’s a smorgasbord.
But Horizon customers who need to virtualize Linux just had the one option: a full Linux desktop running as a standalone VM. But no more! With Horizon 8, Linux virtualization customers now have parity with Windows RDSH customers.
This feature enables multi-session mode in the Horizon Agent for Linux so that different users can connect to their remote desktops or applications in one Linux VM at the same time. You can create published desktop pools and application pools based on farms of Linux virtual machines. Each published desktop or published application can support multiple user sessions at the same time.
This feature brings significant value to customers, because supporting more sessions with fewer VMs leads to cost savings. This new and cost-effective option fulfills a major customer demand for Horizon for Linux.
A closer look at Linux published apps in Horizon 8
In this screenshot of the admin console, you can see that Firefox on Linux is available as a published application.
On the end user’s system, Firefox is running seamlessly on their Windows client (screenshot below).
What else do you need to know? Horizon Agent for Linux published applications are available to remote users as seamless windows over a network connection. The maximum number of simultaneous sessions in one Linux agent is 50. To support 50 sessions, the virtual system requires at least 8 vCPU and 40GB of vRAM. Multi-session mode is supported with RHEL 7.6 and above, RHEL 8.x and Ubuntu 18.04.
Learn more
To find out more about setting up and using this exciting new feature, check out the VMware Horizon 8 version documentation at docs.vmware.com.
