After five months the GA of VMware Horizon View 5.3, now VMware announce officially the new VMware Horizon 6.0 with much emphasis on the features of Horizon View. In the VMware End-User Computing Blog there are several post about it, but of course there are also several other blog post.
Will be an impressive innovation? Will be the year of VDI? Can simple change some rules and equilibrium in the EUC world?
There are of course several new features, but I think that it’s mostly and evolution than a revolution. The main core architecture remain exactly the same, with it’s pro and cons.
About if this could be the year of VDI, I think that after more than five years, nobody will never say this sentence again: the really is that the EUC is a fragmented world and will remain a fragmented world just because there are different needs. But some of the new features of Horizon View can change something.
The key themes are:
- Cloud Pod Architecture with the possibility of global entitlements and federation across View pods
- Virtual SAN to use the Software Defined Storage for Horizon (this was almost ovius after the GA of VSAN)
- RDS Hosted Apps a new brokeing features (this time though View and not Workspace) to permit single application access from any device
- Application Catalog to provide Unified access to desktops & Applications
- vCOPs for View 6 with a new platform & In guest visibility
As written the View architecture hasn’t change so much, but now is more integrated with Workspace and has a new RDS pool for the hosted apps.
But the Cloud Pod Architecture for very large scenarios of multi-datacenter scenarios (scale Horizon deployments to multiple datacenters & > 10,000 sessions) will be really interesting and bring more opportunities and possibility in design (and of course in future VCDX-DT applications).
Also finally it support Windows Server 2012 R2 on the infrastructure servers: actually also with version 5.3.1 for Composer, Connection Servers, Secure Servers, Transport Servers a Windows Server 2008 R2 was needed.
The RDS Hosted Desktops and Apps integrated delivery of applications and full desktops running on Microsoft Windows Remote Desktop Services Hosts (so note that those kind of services and relative CALs are needed) and provide seamless access to Windows Apps from mobile devices with standard Horizon Clients (Win, Mac, IOS & Android) and PCoIP™ protocol (this is the interesting part).
Is not clear if Workspace will be mandatory for this part, but the “applications” pools are defined directly through the View Manager interface. For sure Workspace will be needed to provide the Horizon Application Catalog and integration with XenApp and ThinApp applications (or other applications, like Office 365).
Pat Gelsinger, Sanjay Poonen, and the VMware EUC executives hosted a launch event with partners, customers, and prospects. Also is possible view a quick video from VMware’s CEO, Pat Gelsinger, on the Horizon 6 launch: