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End User Computing (EUC) is a difficult and challenge market: each year there is a promise to solve and manage it with MDM or VDI solutions (wasn’t the 201x the year of VDI?). But enterprise needs conflict with users and consumer needs. Enterprise needs security (at each levels) and users need simplicity (and usability) otherwise the solution is not adopted or accepted.

VMware has address the EUC market in those year (see for example this 2012 report) with different products (like Horizon View, Mirage, AirWatch, …) and still consider it as a major pilar of its strategy. Now they are announcing Workspace ONE and VMware Horizon 7.

Workspace ONE is targeted to the device and application management and deliver to become a “broker” of EUC services: it can deliver Web, Mobile, Cloud, Windows, Horizon and Citrix applications or services.

The new Workspace ONE App will be available for iOS, Android and Windows and can become a Unified Enterprise App Store for all your devices.

It can protect data by restricting sensitive app access, with a real-time check against the AirWatch Policy Engine, and it enforces policies for GPS location, App Blacklist, Jailbroken devices. Also it includes also and integrated Email and Calendar system built for business that is able to protects email and attachments on any device.

Interesting the product strategy: will be available in different editions (standard only for apps and policy, avanced for also a unified end point management and enteprise to handle also virtual apps and desktops) with a cloud subscription model (per user per month) or with a perpetual on-premises (per user).

The new Horizon 7 will rappresent not only a new release but also the evolution from the desktop to the mobile cloud era:

Finally the Cloud Pod Architecture (introduced in Horizon 6) has been improved with not only scaling but also failover capabilites:

• Increased scale: CPA allows federation of up to ten Horizon PODs across up to four sites for a scale of 50,000 sessions
• More flexible entitlements: CPA now allows home site assignments for nested AD security groups.
• Improved failover support: In the event that resources at the user’s home site are exhausted or otherwise not available, user will now be automatically directed to available desktops at other site.
• Integration with VMware Identity Manager: Identity Manager is now fully integrated with CPA. Identity Manager will present the desktops or applications available from any CPA Pod.

And Instant Clones (aka vmFork or project Fargo) are now used also in Horizon to provide just-In-time desktops (Operating System, Applications, and user data) instantly provisioned for the user. View Composer could now be replaced with this new tecnologies, but not totally yet due to several limitation of the new tecnology: only floating desktops are actually supported with instant clones (no support for dedicated desktops), desktops (VDI) only, no RDSH support, only VSAN or VMFS datastores.

And there are a lot of other interesting features of the new Horizon that will deserve more attention, like the new Blast Extrem protocol that can really replace the PCoIP one and become the new default for the future.

Andrea Mauro

Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.