BOOM! VMware announces RDSH & full app publishing support! Been waiting 17 years for a real competitor for Citrix! http://t.co/eBMVbP0tjm
— Brian Madden (@brianmadden) April 9, 2014
VMware recently launched Horizon 6, the new integrated solution delivering published applications and desktops on a single platform. This represents a significant milestone in virtualization, helping our customers to take the next steps in their desktop virtualization journey. Horizon 6 offers our customers a simple and cost-effective solution, delivering a consistent, self-service user experience for access to enterprise applications through one unified workspace. However, what does Horizon 6 mean for the industry as a whole? We caught up with some key bloggers across Europe to get their thoughts.
Barry Coombs -Virtualised Reality
New Blog Post: Horizon 6.0 Announcement & The Future of End User Computing http://t.co/azSt03Jsr8 if this is of interest please share. — Barry Coombs (@VirtualisedReal) April 10, 2014
“If you look at the Horizon 6 release as individual components, any one feature may not be classed as ground breaking or revolutionary, maybe more evolutionary. However, when you stop and consider what is actually happening within end user computing at the moment, I believe this sets VMware ahead of the competition. Over the years we have seen VMware formulating their end user computing vision with many acquisitions, namely Wanova and Airwatch, to allow them to tackle much more than simply Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), with Horizon 6 we are starting to see many elements coming together. I am really excited by the vision of end user computing that VMware is bringing to us and I believe we are now seeing a suite of products that is able to assist with your end user computing strategy, whatever that may be.”
Andrea Mauro – vInfrastructure Blog
#VMware announce #Horizon 6.0 http://t.co/akmBmbq09W #View #VDI #EUC — Andrew Mauro (@Andrea_Mauro) April 10, 2014
“End user computing is, and will remain probably for a long time, a fragmented world with different access devices, PC, laptop, smartphone, tablet, and different technical solutions, local OS, VDI, application virtualization, session virtualization, user state virtualization, due to the different customers’ needs. Horizon 6.0 could now extend the unified access from any device to not only desktops but also to applications with a seamless access and also an application catalog, which could integrate XenApp applications, ThinApp applications and several mainstream SaaS (like Office 365) all with one login and the same consistent experience.”
Vladan Seget – vladan.fr
VMware Horizon View 6 – Major evolution in architecture and tighter integration of suite components… http://t.co/19L31GTrSh — Vladan (@vladan) April 9, 2014
“VMware took a big step forward in an area that not many people were expecting right now. The Horizon 6 architecture is a major update with possibilities to create remote sites with active-active functionality and at the same time provide disaster recovery and a great user experience. At the same time leveraging Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Services’ technology and published apps offers the same functionality as the competition with a clear advantage of the underlying vSphere technology and possibility to also create large clusters by leveraging vSAN, without the need of dedicated SAN devices.”
Erik Scholten and Alex Muetstege – vmguru
VMware announces VMware Horizon 6 http://t.co/2u9w3ZDLEC Full desktops or published apps? GO6 #VMware #Horizon6
— VMGuru.nl (@vmguru_nl) April 9, 2014
Erik: “Before the release of Horizon 6 the VDI battle always came down to basic VDI vs VDI-special-deluxe. After April 9, 2014 there’s hardly any difference, VMware attacks Citrix head on in the XenApp space by adding Remote Desktop Session Host session support and published apps to VMware Horizon! Amazing!
One of the great new features I really like is the Horizon Cloud Pod Architecture, which allows me to design high availability and scale out Horizon 6 deployments across multiple sites or multiple data centers and manage them globally through a single entitlement layer. This seems small, but this dramatically improves the total cost of ownership for my customers.
To bring it all together end users can access all applications and desktops from a single unified workspace. This supports the delivery of virtualized applications hosted in the data center or local on the device, web and SaaS applications, Remote Desktop Services hosted applications, and published applications from third party platforms, such as Citrix XenApp, with a single sign-on experience. All in all a very complete solution from top to bottom with incredible attention for detail. I have been waiting for a Citrix competitor from VMware VDM 2.x and now it’s finally here. Amazing!”
OK, this is officially impressive! Mac OSX integration in Windows apps through! #VMware #Horizon6 http://t.co/iDtfnx80aG
— VMGuru.nl (@vmguru_nl) April 9, 2014
Alex: “Very interesting. First of all is the integration with OS X very impressive. Also, the ease of integration with Published Apps on Citrix Xen and the alleged ease of migration might renew the fires of the desktop wars.“
Patrick Sauerwein – Virtual Patrick
#VMware #Horizon6 – my 2cents | Virtual Patrick http://t.co/RkXRMirKou
— Virtual Patrick (@Virtual_Patrick) April 22, 2014
“VMware now offers Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH) and full app publishing support. This is a real offensive against their competitor Citrix with their flagships XenApp & XenDesktop. RDSH and app publishing was always a thread, now VMware has an answer and a viable alternative product.”
“VMware is now armed with a very scalable solution built for the cloud. I am pretty sure there is more to come in the future building the bridge between mobile endpoints and cloud solutions, like an AirWatch integration into Horizon.”
“VMware and Google partnership will drive the way to a corporate desktop for a mobile cloud era. This partnership shows the potential path of corporate desktops and the importance of ChromeBooks in the near future.”
And finally Brian Madden -brianmadden.com
“Well, it looks like we were all right about April 9, 2014 being big day! What we got wrong was the reason. Who knew that today would go down as the day VMware announced that they’re attacking Citrix head on in the XenApp space by adding RDSH session support and published apps to VMware Horizon, all accessible via PC-over-IP? Amazing! VMware plans to sell this as “Horizon 6.””
“In what’s perhaps the most sensational part of the announcement, you can actually install Horizon 6 on an existing Citrix XenApp server and it will happily run right alongside XenApp!“
“The final awesome thing about Horizon 6 is the client software for published apps. VMware leveraged their six years of “Unity” experience from VMware Workstation and Fusion as the baseline for how the seamless windows published app experience works on the clients.”
“The Horizon 6 remote apps client is truly a no compromise experience and something that Citrix hasn’t gotten right yet even after 17 years of Mac clients.”
Love the way VMware plans to leverage AirWatch with Horizon moving forward! Buh-bye Horizon Data!! http://t.co/My43SOwE4M
— Brian Madden (@brianmadden) April 10, 2014
If you’d like further details on VMware Horizon 6 and its new capabilities, please visit our product page. We’d also love to hear your thoughts on Horizon 6, please tweet us @VMware_uk or leave your comment below.