Earlier today I saw on a couple of blogspost that Vmware was going to announce Horizon 7 later today. So when I read the posts I was blown away in what type of features that are coming in the release.
So what’s included in the upcoming release?
- Project Fargo (VMFork) which in essence the ability to clone a running VM on the fly, just-in-time-desktops. Doing master image updates is as simple as updating the parent virtual machine, a user will automatically get an updated desktop at next login. It is kinda like the same what we have with AppVolumes and delivering of AppStacks, but taken to a whole new level. You can read more about it here –> http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2014/10/07/project-fargo-aka-vmfork-what-is-it/ important to remember this is not like linked-clones, the virtual machines are all running and are updated on the fly. so no composer! but of course this is going to put more strain on the backend storage providers.
also important is that this does not support NFS as of now
- New Horizon Clients version 4 (With new clients for Windows, Mac and Linux, Android, iOS) with increased performance over WAN etc) also the required version if we want to use the new display protocol)
- Updated Identity Manager (As part of the stack and will provide the authentication mechanism across the entire infrastructure using SAML)
- Smart Policies (Customization of desktops and users identity of a running session) application blocking, PCoIP policies and such.
- URL Content Redirection (Allows for URL redirection from within a remote session to be redirected to a local browser running on the Endpoint
- AMD Graphics support for vSGA
- Intel vDGA support with Intel Xeon E3
- Improved printing experience (Reducing bandwidth and increasing speed of printing)
- Blast Extreme (New remote display protocol which is optimized for mobile users) Which apparently has alot lower bandwidth requirements then PCoIP. It is also optimized for NVIDIA Grid. Now in terms of WAN performance, PCoIP has not been anywhere near what Citrix can deliver on using ThinWire or Framehawk so I belive that this is a good call that VMware can move ahead with their own display protocol which does more calibration on the fly.
It is going to be interesting to see how the remote display protocol compares to PCoIP and the other on the marked. And my guess is that since Blast is alot more bandwidth friendly. Also looks like they are investing more into the different aspects of the protocol itself.
Source: http://www.vladan.fr/vmware-horizon-7-details-announced
Some other new stuff which is part of the release is the support for Horizon Air Hybrid Mode, which in essence is moving the control plane to in the Cloud (Similar to what Citrix is doing with their Workspace Cloud)
We can also look at the earlier annoucements of AppVolumes 3.0 as well, which is a perfect stack into this mix in terms of flexible application delivery, of course this is not without compromising some features, but it looks like VMware is becoming a provider of the unified stack. Just hope that they can integrate some of the management components a bit so it feels a bit more like an integrated stack.
But! it seems like Vmware has been quite busy with this release, this is also another complete story when combined with NSX and micro-segmentation in terms of delivering a secure desktop to any device, but I just hope that the display protocol is as good as they say. ill belive it when I see it 
Sources:
http://vthoughtsofit.blogspot.no/
http://www.vladan.fr/vmware-horizon-7-details-announced/