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Abstract
VMware Horizon 6 was announced in April and began shipping in June 2014, bringing a more unified suite delivering more integration with infrastructure and cloud products and more simplicity for all devices. Along with the numerous updates across the Horizon suite, VMware has transitioned to a more traditional product licensing hierarchy. This paper explores the new licensing model and provides an overview of the new features associated with VMware Horizon 6.
Sample
Introduction
VMware Horizon 6 was announced in April and began shipping in June while most of the world was preoccupied with the World Cup. The latest update to Horizon includes several major enhancements:
- Cloud Pod Architecture
- Application Catalog
- Remote Desktop Session (RDS) support
- Virtual SAN (VSAN)
- Automation
- vCenter Operations for View 6
- Horizon Mirage update
- VMware Safe Passage Program
The new release brings a more unified suite delivering more integration with infrastructure and cloud products and more simplicity for all devices. Along with the numerous updates across the Horizon suite, VMware has transitioned to a more traditional product licensing hierarchy.
This white paper will cover the new licensing model and an overview of the new features associated with VMware Horizon 6.
Licensing Overview
As with any major VMware release, the Horizon licensing scheme has been updated to include the new Horizon 6 features and functionality.
Horizon 6 has three license editions available:
- Horizon View Standard Edition: Unchanged from the previous model, includes high-performance VMware Horizon View desktops and ThinApp packaged applications.
- Horizon Advanced Edition: Same as the Standard Edition, plus it includes VSAN (reducing storage costs), Horizon Workspace (supporting software as a service [SAAS] applications), Remote Desktop Services (RDS) support, Office 365, as well as Horizon Mirage.
- Horizon Enterprise Edition: Includes aforementioned features plus the addition of vCenter Operations (vCOPs) for Horizon View, cloud automation (vCAC) integration, and the vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) plug-in.
The Horizon View Standard Edition is licensed per concurrent connection. A concurrent connection is defined as a "powered on desktop virtual machine receiving a connection" in the VMware end-user license agreement (EULA). The Horizon Advanced and Horizon Advanced Editions can be licensed by concurrent connection or by a named user. All editions are available for purchase in quantities of 10 or 100 licenses.
See http://www.vmware.com/products/horizon-view/compare for more information on Horizon licensing.
New Features
This section of the white paper will provide an overview of the most anticipated new feature or changes in Horizon 6. It is not meant to be an all-inclusive list of the changes and features introduced in the new release. Cloud Pod Architecture
One of the more intriguing features of the Horizon 6 suite is the Cloud Pod Architecture. With this feature, it is possible to link together multiple View pods in order to provide a single larger desktop brokering and management environment. An administrator manages each pod independently like a traditional View implementation. A View pod is a unit of organization determined by Horizon View's scalability limits and consists of several objects:
- A set of View Connection Servers
- A database server (either Microsoft SQL or Oracle)
- Shared storage
- The vSphere and network infrastructure required for hosting desktop virtual machines
- Using Cloud Pod Architecture, multiple pods can be joined together to form what is called a pod federation. This pod federation is able to span multiple datacenters and sites-simplifying the administration required to manage a large View environment. This architecture allows up to 20,000 desktops to be created to include up to four pods, two sites, and 20 View Connection Servers.
- At this moment, there is no support for remote Windows applications hosted on Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) hosts nor is there support for the HTML access feature.