Following new features and enhancements have been introduced with Horizon 7:
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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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| Image: VMware |
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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| Image: VMware |
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.
Informative…