By: Courtney Burry, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, EUC

Despite the massive growth in SaaS and mobile app adoption, Windows legacy and custom apps still represent a sizable chunk of the applications used in most enterprise environments today. But with Windows 10 (and its many updates) –managing these types of apps has become even more time consuming and expensive.

Not surprisingly–many of you have turned to virtualization to manage these apps–particularly as part of a larger digital workspace strategy– so you can manage, deliver and secure, these apps in the same way you do your web and mobile environments.

At VMware—we continue to drive innovation in our desktop and application virtualization portfolio to help you simply and cost-effectively manage these legacy Windows apps. What’s more we are tightly integrating this portfolio into our VMware Workspace ONE platform, empowering you to leverage virtualization as part of your larger digital workspace strategy. And we are making it easier than ever to deploy virtual desktops and apps on-premises, in the cloud or a combination of the two. So without further ado, I’m excited today to tell you about what’s new with our flagship desktop and application virtualization products—VMware Horizon and Horizon Cloud .

Horizon 7 joins VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware Cloud allowed IT organizations to extend SDDC into the cloud with AWS. And now are following suit with Horizon 7….

With VMware Horizon 7 on VMware Cloud on AWS, you can extend your on-premises Horizon 7 implementations to the cloud to address a wide range of use cases including on demand capacity, disaster recovery and cloud-colocation without the need to stand up additional on-premises infrastructure. You get a seamlessly integrated hybrid cloud for virtual desktops and applications. You can build this hybrid cloud by straddling Cloud Pod Architecture (CPAs) across your on-premises and AWS infrastructure. CPAs can also be deployed across multiple AWS locations to support highly distributed environments. What’s more, you can leverage the same admin management experience for VMware vSphere and Horizon 7 across VMware Cloud on AWS to streamline how you manage your entire hybrid deployment.

To find out more about getting access to this new service-check out our new Horizon and Workspace ONE subscription offers below.

Horizon Cloud for VDI on Azure Accelerates the Move to Windows 10

Late last year, we announced the availability of RDS-based Horizon Cloud apps and desktops with Microsoft Azure. And today we are excited to extend this support to Windows 10 Virtual Desktops. With these joint services, you will be able to connect your own instance of Azure with the Horizon Cloud control plane to quickly set and deliver virtualized Windows apps and Windows 10 persistent and non-persistent desktops. You can enjoy low-cost, hourly billing for your Azure capacity, and take advantage of a global footprint that spans 50 datacenters. What’s more, you can easily import your images directly from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and apply the necessary agents within minutes.

As part of this announcement, VMware is also launching the Horizon Control Plane in Australia alongside the US and Germany. Finally, as part of this release, Horizon Cloud is now supported on Azure US Gov. Cloud.

At VMware, we are seeing a lot of interest around these new services–and Ron Neher, Principal Solution Architect over at DXC had this to say:

“The Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure solution brings together two great technologies. We are excited to see the solution expand to support virtual desktops and applications. DXC and VMware offer a robust portfolio of hybrid cloud services and solutions that combine VMware technologies with DXC services, expertise, and support to guide mutual clients on the journey to an ‘as-a-service,’ cloud-enabled enterprise, accelerating cost savings and speeding time-to-market.”

User Experience Gets Smarter and Bolder

Blast Extreme has just gotten smarter! Horizon clients will now choose the right transport automatically to provide users with the best possible user experience. This completely automates the process and removes the burden of having to try to guess which transport to go with as users connect. The end result—much better user experience across all networks and connections.

At VMware, we are also making it easier than ever for you to take advantage of high-end workstation-class graphics by providing NVIDIA GRID vGPU support across all of our Horizon offerings. Today, we are excited to announce the beta for NVIDIA vGPUs with Horizon Cloud Win10 apps and desktops with IBM SoftLayer. This end-to-end DaaS offering provides you with support for NVIDIA desktops across 5 different GPU profiles. VMware is also pleased to announce support for Horizon Cloud RDSH apps and desktops with Microsoft Azure for workstation users. These two new services compliment the NVIDIA GRID offerings that folks are already able to enjoy with Horizon 7 today and ensure that end users can get a bold and rich user-experience with Horizon both on-premises and in the cloud.

New Subscription Licensing for Workspace ONE and Horizon

By popular demand, we announced a new Workspace ONE Enterprise subscription offer last month that allows you to consume Horizon 7 Apps and Desktops through a subscription offer as part of the Workspace ONE. Today we are pleased to announce a new Horizon universal subscription license that allows you to deploy Horizon Cloud or Horizon 7 for one low price.

All those looking to deploy Horizon 7 on VMware Cloud on AWS, now have the choice to enable this as part of a larger Workspace ONE deployment with WS1 Enterprise and Enterprise for VDI as a subscription or through this new Horizon Universal subscription license starting as low as $8.95/user/month for apps and $16/user/month for desktops and apps.

Horizon 7.5 Introduces JMP in a Whole New Light

At VMworld this past August, we showed you a tech preview of how we are taking JMP (our just-in-time desktop platform) to the next level by making desktop creation speedy and seamless. For those of you who are new to JMP—this is the collection of Instant Clones technology for the rapid provisioning of images, VMware App Volumes for just-in-time app delivery, and User Environment Manager for user personalization, profile management and policies. When you combine these capabilities together—you get the ability to create personalized and truly stateless desktops in seconds.

In Horizon 7.5 (which we are excited to announce today)- we are bringing this collection of JMP technologies together and integrating them into a single common workflow. IT admins can easily create VDI workspaces consisting of a desktop OS, applications and settings- in an integrated manner that focuses on user needs. The JMP workflow engine automatically creates entitlements to deliver this workspace and makes it incredibly easy to make changes and simplifies the testing and delivery of Windows 10 and application updates.

NEW Extended Service Branch for Horizon 7

To better meet the needs of those of you looking to stay on your current version of Horizon and still receive bug fixes and security updates, we will also be offering a new Extended Service Branch (ESB) for VMware Horizon 7 Enterprise deployments, which will include the core Horizon 7 platform, VMware App Volumes, and VMware User Environment Manager. You can read more about this here.

Workspace ONE Intelligence Rolls Out Tech Preview with Horizon and Horizon Apps

Just last month, we introduced Workspace ONE Intelligence, which will allow you to take advantage of deep insights, enable smart unified endpoint management planning, and deliver powerful automation for the digital workspace. Today, we are pleased to announce a tech preview of Workspace ONE Intelligence for Horizon and Horizon Apps. With this tech preview, you can leverage a single pane of glass to get insights into both your physical and virtual endpoints for comprehensive visibility into all of your employees, apps (inclusive of virtual apps) and Win10 operating systems. You can also take advantage of system health and user environment monitoring, leverage rules and alerts to simplify admin tasks and monitor your virtual apps through customizable dashboards to improve security, compliance and user experience. This SaaS service will not be included in existing Horizon perpetual bundles.

In the End

Are Windows legacy apps going away in the enterprise? No way. But not to worry…because we are making it a whole lot easier for you to manage, deliver and secure these apps on your own to address a whole slew of use cases (think DR, bursting, mobile workers and more) and as part of your larger digital workspace strategy. And if you are headed to Synergy—be sure to stop by our booth to see all of these new innovations in action.

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