Today VMware Inc. announced its virtual desktop product’s latest version with VMware Horizon 8. The latest update comes with new support for more clouds, new Instant Clones Smart Provisioning capabilities, improved collaboration, and better security amongst other benefits. The updates will benefit healthcare, financial institutions, education and the general day-to-day office worker.
Today VMware Inc. announced its virtual desktop product’s latest version with VMware Horizon 8. The latest update comes with new support for more clouds, new Instant Clones Smart Provisioning capabilities, improved collaboration, and better security amongst other benefits. The updates will benefit healthcare, financial institutions, education and the general day-to-day office worker.
The Covid-19 pandemic is forcing many people to work remotely, mostly from home. Due to this, many organizations are either switching to, or strongly looking at desktop and application virtualization products to give employees what they need while keeping company data secure. To this end, VMware announced upcoming updates to VMware Horizon 8. Updates will help IT teams more efficiently manage and easily scale virtual desktop and application delivery from a single control plane across public and private clouds.
VMware Horizon 8 key capabilities include:
- Expanded Hybrid and Multi-cloud Deployment Options – Customers can leverage the cloud or clouds of their choice to cost-effectively deliver VDI and application capabilities on managed infrastructure, quickly scaling and provisioning workloads with the feature-rich VMware Horizon platform. Support for VMware Horizon on Google Cloud VMware Engine and VMware Horizon on VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is now available. Support for VMware Horizon on Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is expected to be available upon general availability of that service. Each of these VMware Cloud Verified services is built on VMware Cloud Foundation, allowing VMware Horizon customers to further leverage their VMware expertise and investments.
- New Instant Clone Capabilities: Instant Clone Smart Provisioning helps IT directly provision instant clones without requiring a parent VM, freeing up greater memory resources and increasing desktops per host, reducing VDI and published application costs. Further Instant Clone innovations include dynamic pool expansion and elastic DRS to quickly scale demand up and down across public and private clouds hosting VMware Horizon, for example with VMware Cloud on AWS, to meet urgent needs to support their distributed workforces
- VMware Horizon REST APIs: NewRESTful APIs help automate rich capabilities available in VMware Horizon 8, including monitoring, entitlements, and user and machine management. IT can easily interact with VMware Horizon 8 for added flexibility, distributing and accessing information, and modernizing services with speed.
- Unified Communications and Collaboration Support: With growing demand for collaboration tools to support distributed workforces, VMware Horizon now offers an optimized experience for Microsoft Teams video and audio, in addition to Zoom and Cisco Webex, that enables improved productivity and a better user experience from virtual desktops.
- Linux-Hosted Applications: Linux applications can now be published directly from a Linux server in the VMware Horizon platform, helping reduce costs associated with licenses from other operating system platforms.
The company also announced that customers leveraging VMware Horizon 8 can also use the same control plane to deploy and manage hybrid environments that extend to VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure, one of VMware’s desktop-as-a-service offerings. This give support to features on Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop that include Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session and VMware App Volumes.
Companies new to VDI may worry more about security as the end devices are out in the wild. However, VDI, such as VMware horizon, have built-in security as data and apps reside in the datacenter and not on the end devices. VMware takes this to the next step through integrations to Workspace ONE Access, VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud, NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi Networks) and Unified Access Gateway. For end devices, VMware can leverage protection form its Carbon Black segment.
Availability
The VMware Horizon 8 2006 release is expected to be generally available in VMware’s Fiscal third quarter of 2021 that ends October 30, 2020.
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