VMware last week announced a new suite of end-user computing products called the Horizon Suite. The suite bundles a lot of products which either VMware developed themselves, or did acquire in the last couple of years and is part of the vision which VMware already detailed during the VMware Forum in May last year. The suite consists of VMware’s VDI product View which is now called Horizon View, Horizon Mirage and Horizon Workspace. The suite delivers a complete solution for delivering a consistent virtual workspace across different devices. Among View, Mirage and Workspace also the technologies of Project Octopus and AppBlast, Project AppShift, VMware ThinApp and Horizon Mobile are integrated into this product suite.
Horizon Mirage is centralized management and recovery solution for physical desktop images over the cloud, uses a layering technology to segment OS, applications and user personalizations into isolated containers allowing administrators to manage separately hardware and each layer of software. VMware acquired the Mirage product when it acquired Wanova in May last year.
Horizon Workspace is a new product name containing both Horizon Application Manager and Horizon Data, which we used to know as Project Octopus. Horizon Application Manager offers an Enterprise Application Store capable of presenting Windows-based applications in addition to both public and private cloud based applications in a centralized, policy-based way. Project Octopus, which is now called Horizon Data provides on- and off-premise enterprise data sharing functionality.
Horizon View is updated to version 5.2. Version 5.2 is the follow-up of version 5.1 which was released in May 2012. Version 5.2 adds the following new features:
- Support for Hardware Accelerated 3D graphics build upon the vSphere platform
- Support for Microsoft Lync 2013 using PC over IP (PCoIP) providing voice and video chat
- Access to Horizon View using HTML-5 capable browsers. This is project AppBlast technology which is now part of View.
- Horizon View Clients for iOS and Android incorporating the Project AppShift technology making it easier to use applications originally written use within Windows Desktop environments on mobile devices
- Support for Windows 8
- Scalability improvements
- Support for 10,000 desktops in a pod on a single vCenter Server
- Support for 32 hosts per pool on VMFS along with NFS
- Pools spanning multiple VLANs
- View Admin UI responsiveness improvements
The Horizon Suite will be licensed per named user with prices starting at $300. VMware has released a white paper titled:"VMware End-User Computing Products Pricing, Licensing and Upgrading" detailing all the licensing information about the Horizon Suite. All of the Horizon Suite products will also be sold individually. VMware Horizon Suite is expected to be available in Q1 2013