In April this year, VMware announced version 6 of its end user computing suite: Horizon. Yesterday VMware View, the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and now also the Remote Desktop Services was quietly released by VMware.
Starting with this version VMware not only provides a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution based on View, but now also provides a Server Based Computing (SBC) solution leveraging Remote Desktop Services (RDS) from Microsoft. With the addition of SBC, VMware is now capable of publishing applications, where the application runs on a server which is shared with other users at the same time.
Version 6 provides the following new features as described in the release notes:
- Hosted Apps and Desktops
- Cloud Pod Architecture
- View integration with VMware Virtual SAN technology
- View Connection Server, security server, and View Composer are supported on Windows Server 2012 R2 operating systems.
- Ability to send View logs to a Syslog server such as VMware vCenter Log Insight.
- Support for RDS remote applications and desktops with the View Agent Direct-Connection Plug-in.
- Enhanced smart card authentication for View Administrator.
- Integration of remote applications with Workspace. Users can launch View applications from the Workspace user portal.
- Real-Time Audio-Video installs a new kernel-mode webcam driver on View desktops that provides better compatibility with browser-based video apps and other 3rd-party conferencing software.
- The Remote Experience Agent is now integrated with View Agent. Previously, you had to install View Agent and the Remote Experience Agent to use features such as HTML Access, Unity Touch, Real-Time Audio-Video, and Windows 7 Multimedia Redirection. Now you obtain these features by installing View Agent only.
- Virtual machine space reclamation is supported for Windows 8 and 8.1 linked clone machines in a vSphere 5.5 or later environment.
- View Persona Management is supported on Windows 8.1 desktops. It is also supported on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 desktops that are based on physical or virtual machines.
- The Blast Secure Gateway (BSG) now supports up to 800 connections to remote desktops from clients using HTML Access. This connection limit applies to a BSG on one View Connection Server instance or security server.
In this View release, the View Local Mode capability has been removed from the Windows client.
https://www.vmware.com/support/horizon-view/doc/horizon-view-60-release-notes.html