New features in VMware Horizon 8

VMware Horizon 8 has been released with many great new features as well as a rebranding of the product's versioning. Let's take a look at the new features and capabilities of VMware Horizon 8 2006.

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Brandon Lee

Brandon Lee has been in the IT industry 15+ years and focuses on networking and virtualization. He contributes to the community through various blog posts and technical documentation primarily at Virtualizationhowto.com.

VMware Horizon 8 rebranding and new features

With this release of VMware Horizon, VMware is setting its sights even more seriously on the cloud and hybrid cloud environments. However, one noticeable departure in this release is the rebranding of the product.

While VMware has maintained the sequential numbering of the product versions for this release, VMware Horizon "8," a new version scheme has been introduced. From this point forward, VMware will number the Horizon releases with the version of "YYMM" following "VMware Horizon."

So VMware Horizon 8 is also known as VMware Horizon "2006," with the release arriving, at least internally for VMware, in the year 2020 and the month of June, or 06. Putting these two together makes the "2006" version of Horizon.

It seems to be increasingly popular for companies that are embracing more aggressive release cycles and cloud environments to do away with the major version numbering and instead coming up with versioning that works a bit more seamlessly. We can see this with Microsoft and what they have done with the Windows 10 release versioning.

VMware has dropped the major number after the VMware Horizon name

Now that we have taken a look at the rebranding of the product, what new features and capabilities are included with the release of VMware Horizon 8 2006? Let's look at the following new features:

New cloud environments and universal broker
More intelligent image and application management
Real-time performance monitoring and security
Better instant clones, including smart provisioning
Elastic DRS
New features in app volumes
Blast Extreme Protocol has been improved
Improved unified communications
High-end graphics support from both NVIDIA and AMD
Integration with VMware intrinsic security products

New cloud environments and universal broker

VMware has continued to push toward better cloud support across their solutions and product lines. VMware Horizon is certainly a step in this direction. With this release of VMware Horizon 8 2006, you can use VMware Cloud on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and VMware Cloud on Dell EMC.

Also, there is a new component in VMware Horizon 8 2006 called the Universal Broker. With the Universal Broker, you can enable global entitlement no matter where the resource exists. This enables intelligently provisioning users to a personal desktop or application in any cloud environment across the board.

VMware Horizon 8 Connection Server connection

More intelligent image and application management

Another area of improvement with the VMware Horizon 8 2006 release is in the area of image and application management. With this release, image and application management have been simplified and include the ability to cover images/apps across different pods and even cloud environments. This enables creating an image once and then distributing it across the environment, no matter which cloud or pod you choose to distribute to. This allows for much more seamless, easy management across your entire environment without having to maintain images and apps for each.

Real-time performance monitoring and security

VMware has continued to add to the native tools available in the VMware Horizon platform. New with this release are real-time performance monitoring and end-to-end security.

VMware has ramped up the security in VMware Horizon 8 even further, which is great news considering most employees are working remotely with enhanced security threats due to the nature of the current work situation. The new end-to-end security enhancements with Horizon 8 2006 will no doubt help bolster security for remote workers.

Better instant clones, including smart provisioning

New, enhanced instant clones that have been greatly enhanced for efficiency are included with VMware Horizon 8 2006. With VMware Horizon 8 2006, you can have stateless, non-persistent desktops in seconds without having to have the footprint of the parent VM.

Instant clones no longer require the parent VM construct, which saves on diskspace and other resources that were previously required for use with instant clones. This new feature is known as Instant Clone Smart Provisioning.

Elastic DRS

A very "cloudy" new feature that is included with VMware Horizon 8 2006 is the new Elastic DRS, which allows organizations to dynamically expand desktop pools and quickly burst up or down, depending on the needs of their environment and user workloads.

New App Volumes features

VMware App Volumes have been improved in this release. This includes new portability features that enable packaging applications once and then using them anywhere, including any cloud. The app packaging process has been streamlined and includes improved inventory and lifecycle management.

The new App Volumes also supports new environments such as Horizon Cloud on Azure. Rollouts and deployments include many possible configurations, including rollbacks. This helps to strengthen the flexibility that organizations have with deploying applications.

Blast Extreme protocol has been improved

Blast Extreme is VMware's proprietary display protocol that provides the most powerful way to communicate with backend desktop resources. New with the VMware Horizon 8 2006 release, the VMware Blast Extreme protocol offers the following:

High-quality video
3D graphics workloads
New HEVC H.265 codecs and GPUs
Support for 4K and 8K monitors

Improved unified communication

Remote workers need the tools that allow them to be productive and carry out daily business-critical tasks. With VMware Horizon 8, VMware has improved the unified communications features in its solution. New optimization packs have been released for Zoom as well as WebEx. Additionally, new enhanced audio and video support have been included, along with support for Microsoft Teams.

High-end graphics support from both NVIDIA and AMD

With VMware Horizon 8 2006, VMware has improved the offering for high-end graphics. This includes support for NVIDIA GRID and Quadro. They have partnered with NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD to provide rich graphics support and optimizations for modern office applications and multimedia requirements.

Integration with VMware intrinsic security products

VMware continues to fully integrate the VMware Horizon platform with the full portfolio of VMware security products, including Workspace ONE, VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud, NSX Advanced Load Balancer by Avi Networks, and the Unified Access Gateway. Additionally, with the acquisition of Carbon Black, VMware continues to integrate next-generation endpoint security into desktop workloads to implement a true zero-trust environment.

Wrapping Up

VMware Horizon 8 2006 represents the most modern and advanced Horizon platform to date. VMware has begun the process of rebranding the product to drop the trailing major version in the name. Aside from the rebranding, they are continuing to strengthen the cloud interoperability of the product to allow organizations to run their Horizon workloads on any cloud and have seamless, centralized management to control all environments in a single management plane.

VMware has continued to improve the capabilities of VMware Horizon from a unified communications and multimedia standpoint by incorporating additional integrations from communications platforms and improving the Blast Extreme protocol to support high-end graphics codecs and platforms.