VMware made Horizon 6 Download available. Freshly released Horizon 6 Suite binaries are available. Major release of the suite which includes Horizon View 6, Horizon Workspace 2.0 (haven't seen the Mirage 5.0 yet so the latest release of Mirage is still 4.4.3).
Horizon View 6 is a major release of the product with some major new features from the architectural standpoint but also brings many new functions.
Cloud POD architecture – where the horizon deployments will be able to use global LDAP replication between different datacenters. The metadata will replicate over to the other side where data are replicated like the user entitlements. The global data layer is stored in a new ADLDS instance.
Multi-forest AD support – The integration is done through domain joined connector-VAs and users can chose which domain they want to login.
It’s possible to scale Horizon deployments to multiple datacenters with over 10,000 sessions.
Horizon Hosted App – similar way than in Citrix XenApp, Horizon View 6 allows:
- Integration of RDS hosts with preinstalled applications
- Access to Windows apps from mobile devices
- Using standard Horizon Clients with PCoIP (Windows, MAC, IOS and Android).
All the applications with their entitlements are managed through the Horizon View 6 admin portal.
The simplifies administration for administrators and provides the applications to users. In some future posts I’ll try to put accent on the different ways of accessing those applications as you can basically acces those applications different ways:
- Use the View client and with PCoIP.
- Use the HTML access (with VMware Blast technology) which does not need any installation of software on the endpoints.
To get the RDS applications working through Horizon 6 it's very easy. I tested it out. If you wan to have a look, you can check how to publish RDS application in Horizon View 6 here.
VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) – Horizon View since its version 5.3 supported VSAN integration. What's making it more exciting is the fact that clients buying the Advanced and Enterprise version get VSAN license too.
It means that new deployments and architectures can leverage this fast hybrid storage also called hypervizor converged platform. The overall cost of VDI solutions is almost always a problem. By having VSAN in the package helps!
The usage of spinning disks together with SSDs where the SSDs are used for read/write caching.
Magnetic disks are participating for storage capacity where the SSD disks does not. SSDs are for Read/write caching.
- First write to SSD cache and then to HDD
- First read from SSD cache and then if the block isn’t there, read from HDD.
Individual VMs or group of VMs can be configured with different storage policies:
- Number of disk stripes per object – is number of HDDs across which each replica of a storage object is distributed.
- Number of Failures to tolerate – how many number of hosts, network and/or disk failures a storage object can tolerate. Example for N number of failures to be tolerated in the cluster, “N+1″ copies of the storage object (VMs files) are created and at least “2N+1″ hosts are required to be in the cluster.
- Object space reservation – is percentage of logical size of storage object (including snapshots, that should be reserved – thick). The rest of the object is thin provisioned.
I'm currently testing VSAN in my lab. Read more about VSAN in this detailed article.
Horizon Workspace got renamed to VMware Workspace
VMware Workspace 2.0 previously Horizon Workspace 1.8 apparently took off the file sharing capabilities which were still present in 1.8.
Unified space from which you can go and launch applications. There are different applications (SaaS, or Citrix, Remote apps, local apps as Thinapps).You can use different platforms and browsers.
- Xenapp Integration – Xenapp application can now be integrated in the Horizon catalog and through the Horizon UI you can entitle users and groups based on Xenapp farm. Support for Xenapp 5.0 and above. You’ll need to install Citrix Receiver on the client.
- ThinApp package delivery on any Windows desktop – It’s possibly to deliver Thinapps to clients which lays outside of the Microsoft domain. Suppporting Windows DFS for app distribution. It’s possible to use Thinapp 5.0 packages with x32 or x65 applications. Uses Kerberos to automatic logins for client.
- Office 365 and non-SAML – SSO is used from Horizon Workspace to Office 365, Sharepoint and Outlook 365 Web applications.
- Improved resource mgmt and categorization
- Integration with Horizon View
It's possible to customize an installation with a logo…
vCenter Operations for View 6 – this is also newly updated.
Now more scalable (25 000 concurrent users per instance). The new “what if” capability was added.
Newly added also:
- Single console for all vCOPs (desktop, server..)
- RDSH session support
- Application and in guest process metrics with the possibility to do a drill down to each individual process. You can get visibility fast to troubleshoot where the bottleneck is. Faster and straight forward problem identification.
- Desktop workloads optimization and modeling.
Thinapp 5.0.1. now can package x64 bit applications. Otherwise no new functions, but you can check all the different details about what's changed with this introduction on the release notes page here.
Read further details about Horizon 6 suite here. You can get the trial of Horizon 6 suite from the products page here.
