Whats new in VMware Horizon 7

Following new features and enhancements have been introduced with Horizon 7:

Instant Clones

  • New type of desktop virtual machines that can be provisioned faster than the current View Composer linked clones.Fully functional desktop can be provisioned in two seconds or less.
  • Clones are automatically rebalanced across available datastores.
  • View storage accelerator is automatically enabled.

Cloud Pod Architecture Improvements

  • The Cloud Pod Architecture feature in Horizon 7 supports a pod federation of up to 25 pods across up to five sites for a scale of 50,000 sessions.
  • In the event that resources at a user’s home site are exhausted or otherwise not available, the user is now automatically directed to available desktops at other sites.
  • Home site administration is now fully supported in View Administrator.
  • The Cloud Pod Architecture feature supports home site assignments for nested AD security groups.
  • Full integration of  VMware Identity Manager with the Cloud Pod Architecture feature.

Smart Policies

  • Control of the clipboard cut-and-paste, client drive redirection, USB redirection, and virtual printing desktop features through policies.
  • PCoIP session control through PCoIP profiles.
  • Conditional policies based on user location, desktop tagging, pool name, and Horizon Client registry values.

  VMware Blast Extreme

  • VMware Blast Extreme is now fully supported on the Horizon platform.
    • Administrators can select the VMware Blast display protocol as the default or available protocol for pools, farms, and entitlements.
    • End users can select the VMware Blast display protocol when connecting to remote desktops and applications.
  • VMware Blast Extreme features include:
    • TCP and UDP transport support
    • H.264 support for the best performance across more devices
    • Reduced device power consumption for longer battery life
    • NVIDIA GRID acceleration for more graphical workloads per server, better performance, and a superior remote user experience

True SSO:

  • For VMware Identity Manager integration, True SSO streamlines the end-to-end login experience. After users log in to VMware Identity Manager using a smart card or an RSA SecurID or RADIUS token, users are not required to also enter Active Directory credentials in order to use a remote desktop or application.
  • Uses a short-lived Horizon virtual certificate to enable a password-free Windows login.
  • Supports using either a native Horizon Client or HTML Access.
  • System health status for True SSO appears in the View Administrator dashboard.
  • Can be used in a single domain, in a single forest with multiple domains, and in a multiple-forest, multiple-domain setup.
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Access Point 2.5 Integration

  • Full support for Smart card authentication.
  • RSA SecurID and RADIUS authentication methods have been added.
  • Smart policies can be used with Access Point.
  • VMware Blast protocol can now be directed to port 443. Previously, port 8443 was required.

Note: Access Point 2.6 version serves as a reverse proxy for VMware Identity Manager only.

URL Content Redirection for Windows Horizon Clients

  • For specific URLs, you can configure whether, when end users click a link to that URL in an Internet Explorer browser or an application, or if they type the URL into an Internet Explorer browser, that link gets opened always on a Windows-based client system or always in a remote desktop or application.
  • URL links can be links to Web pages, telephone numbers, email addresses, and more.
  • Configured through group policy.
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 Flash Redirection for Windows Horizon Clients

  • Flash content in an Internet Explorer browser is sent to the Windows-based client and played in a Flash container window, thereby offloading demand on the ESXi host.
  • Configured through an agent-side group policy that specifies a white list of Web sites to use Flash Redirection.

Windows Server 2016 Support

  • Windows Server 2016 can be used as an RDS host for providing remote desktops and hosted applications.
  • For this release, Windows Universal apps are not supported as hosted remote applications.
  • For example, Universal apps do not appear in the list of apps provided by a Windows Server 2016 RDS farm.
  • Universal apps, such as the Microsoft Edge browser or the Calculator included with Windows 10 or a Windows Server 2016 RDS host, are built on the Universal Windows Platform (UWP).
  • Universal apps require Windows Explorer to be run.
  • In addition, manually launching Universal apps through the Command Prompt will show an error message.

Horizon 7 for Linux Desktops

  • Support for SLED 11 SP3/SP4. However, Single Sign-on is not supported.
  • Support for HTML Access 4.0.0 on Chrome.
  • Support for CentOS 7.1 Linux distribution.
  • Support to check the dependency packages unique to a Linux distribution before installing Horizon Agent.
  • Support to use the Subnet option of /etc/vmware/viewagent-custom.conf to specify the subnet used for Linux desktop connections with multiple subnets connected.

Additional Features

  • Support for IPv6 with VMware Blast Extreme on security servers.
  • View Administrator security protection layer. See VMware Knowledge Base (KB) article 2144303 for more information.
  • Protection against inadvertent pool deletion.
  • RDS per-device licensing improvements.
  • Support for Intel vDGA.
  • Support for AMD Multiuser GPU Using vDGA.
  • More resilient upgrades.
  • Display scaling for Windows Horizon Clients.
  • DPI scaling is supported if it is set at the system level and the scaling level is greater than 100.

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