VMware Horizon 6 GA Released!

Yesterday, VMware Horizon 6 (formerly View, and Horizon View) was released for general availability! Yay! Now, if you are not familiar, Horizon 6 has a ton of really interesting features, and I am excited to get my hands on it. 

What's New in Horizon 6?

Well, there is a lot of new features—over 150, in fact! But we are only going to cover a few of them here, the ones that I am personally most excited about, and the ones that I think businesses will likely see as meeting their requirements the most (a.k.a., the most asked-for features).  

VMware Horizon 6 | Architecture

There are three Horizon 6 editions, Standard, Advanced and Enterprise; though in my experience customers will go for either Standard (View only, full VDI but no vSOM, VSAN, etc.) or Enterprise (everything included, especially hosted apps and vSOM). 

Unified Workspaces

Very excited to have a truly unified workspace across all devices! Now you can pick up and move and disconnect and log back in—whatever device—and be right where you were! Awesome. And add some more applications with the application catalog.

Remote Desktop Services Hosted Applications

Windows 2012 has a great feature for thin application publishing built right in, called Hosted Apps (RDSH). And Horizon 6 really takes advantage of this—check this video out and look at how quickly an app can be provisioned to users. 

Virtual Graphics Acceleration

Using supported hardware such as NVIDIA Grid adapters, you can pass graphics acceleration through from the host to the guest directly! Now virtualizing your high-end creative desktops is much more feasible the performance is near-native.

vSphere Operations Management for Horizon 6

So what good is all this awesomeness if there isn't any management to it? One of the most common complaints in a VDI setup is sluggishness with regard to end-user experience. Now, with Horizon 6, there is tighter integration into vSOM (formerly vCOPS or vCOps, depending on your capitalization scheme), enabling admins to troubleshoot faster and more accurately. 

vSOM for Horizon 6