EUC Announcements at VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas

It’s a great day for me as an EUC enthusiast. First of all for being part of VMworld in Las Vegas. Last year I felt lucky to have attended the greatest virtualization event on the globe. But being able to attend it for the second time including an onstage performance during this year’s edition is quite unbelievable. Second of all, VMware did a great job in having the EUC announcements on the first day of VMworld 2017. I think did is due to the fact that they did some major announcements today in the EUC space. This post gives you an overview of those announcements for the Horizon Suite.

VMware Horizon

Horizon Application Shortcuts

In Horizon 7.3, it will be possible to add shortcuts to RDSH Applications to the Windows Start Menu of the endpoint. In this way, it gives admins the ability to pre-create shortcuts for end-users and create a native user experience for Horizon Apps

Session Prelaunch

With session pre launch, an admin will be able to configure a published application so that a user session and application is launched as soon as the user has authenticated to the connection server. With this feature, applications that are frequently used can be launched faster.

Skype for Business

One of the biggest announcements around the Skype for Business Horizon Virtualization Pack, is the support for RDSH Apps. In this case, you will be able to publish Skype for Business as a Remote App including offloading support to the endpoint.

The already rich featureset has been extended as well. With the latest version, the following features will be added:

Multiparty conferencing
E911
Customized ringtones
Forward Error Correction (FEC)
Quality of Experience (QOE)
Call partk and pickup
USB Desk Phone support

Furthermore, Vmware added Linux support and macOS support (in private beta) for endpoint OS’es.

Blast Extreme: Protocol Enhancements

Blast Extreme is getting better and better. Some of the improvements that VMware announced today:

Improved performance counters
Improved session reconnections
Improved TCP bandwidth estimation
Lower CPU consumption on the endpoint and virtual desktop
Support for low bandwidth connections (128K)
USB redirection can be configured to work over TCP and UDP ports 443 & 8443
Faster file transfers across WAN (up to 6X)
Lower bandwidth utilization (up to 50%)
Higher framerates under extreme network conditions (up to 13X)

Session Collaboration

A pretty cool and brand new feature. With this feature, it will be possible for designers or developers, to share their session with someone else. That person can sort-of shadow the designer’s session and collaborate on certain tasks. The H.264 Hi444 PP codec can be leveraged to create high quality lossless display images which is really usefull for complex CAD designs. GPU’s are recommended to use this feature due to the amount of resources it might consume.

NVIDIA Tesla P40 support

NVIDIA announced new cards a couple of weeks ago. In Horizon 7.3, these new cards are full supported included the high end Tesla P40 card with Pascal GPU’s.

Linux NVIDIA GRID & BEAT

Linux Virtual Desktops can be accelerated with NVIDIA GRID for heavy 3D applications. NVENC is supported and Blast Extreme Adaptive Transport will be leveraged as a connection protocol. It’s currently only supported with NVIDIA Tesla M60, M6 and M10 cards. BEAT can dynamically adjust the user experience based on varying connection speeds and in case of severe packet loss.

HTML5 Video Redirection

The title says it all. With this new feature, we are able to redirect videos from HTML5-based websites such as Youtube to the local endpoint. In this case, video transfers won’t be run through the connection protocols, but will be streamed directly to the endpoint from the HTML5 site for a better user experience. A window client and chrome browser are required to leverage this feature.

Raspberry Pi support

Finally, it is possible to use a Raspberry Pi as an Horizon Client. A RBPi3 is required, next to Blast Extreme and TCP only (for now). As the RBPi3 has a hardware decoder for H.264, the graphics support is awesome (1920 x 1080 FullHD resolution)!

App Volumes

Next to Horizon features, VMware also announced new App Volumes features:

Improved login times
Combined assignments at both user and computer based entitlements
Attachments at startup and login
Address Apps with large Registry Operations
Archive- and restore points for writable volumes
AppStack attachment limit (set a limit for the number of connections to a single AppStack)

JMP

The Just-in-Time Management Platform (or JMP) is the combined power of InstantCloning, UEM and App Volumes that let create new use cases by simply selecting different components (desktops pools, AppStacks and application settings) and deploy it instantly. It was first announced in App Volumes 3.0, but wasn’t available for on-prem customers. But now it is and it looks awesome!