Horizon 6.1 announced

Last week VMware announced Horizon 6.1, the latest version of VMware’s End User Computing Suite. A couple of new cool features are introduced with it:

Applications: Unlimited Access

Of course, USB redirection is part of the Horizon Client for quite some time now, but in the new release it supports new features including the use of Scanning & Imaging devices from RDSH desktops and apps, USB Mass Storage Devices to access files on USB memory sticks and SmartCard support to enable secure login for use cases in finance and federal markets, and support for HTML Access for RDSH session based desktops. The new features will only be available on Windows 7 or higher based desktops. The support for these new features on older Windows versions is ended. Also, which is pretty neat, there is support for Windows Server 2012R2 as desktop OS. As Windows Server 2012R2 can be licensed as Datacenter Edition (single license per physical CPU socket), for bigger environments it could be cheaper to get compliant.

NVIDIA GRID vGPU

With the launch of vSphere 6, support for NVIDIA’s vGPU is finally there. Last year on VMworld Barcelona, vGPU was announced. It’s quite simple, the technology let’s you share a GPU between desktops instead of having it be allocated to a single desktop. In this way, the complete pool of GPU’s in a GRID card can be used between all desktops. Of course, a GRID card is still needed to be able to use vGPU.

Storage

In the new release, support for both Virtual SAN 6.0 and Virtual Volumes was announced. More regarding both storage techniques can be found here and here.

Cloud Pod Architecture

In Horizon 6, Cloud Pod Architecture was released to be finally able to span a View Environment across multiple locations. The only downside in creating global entitlements was that managing and monitoring could only be done on the command line. In Horizon 6.1, it is finally possible to do this via a graphical user interface.

Horizon for Linux

Yep, you are reading it well. Horizon for Linux. VMware now supports Linux as a desktop operating system, especially for developers and governments that need Linux as a desktop environment. It is possible to register for the Early Access Program here.