VMware Horizon 7.0 GA - here’s what’s new (part 4 -the Rest)

24Mar/160

VMware Horizon 7.0 GA - here’s what’s new (part 4 -the Rest)

VMware Horizon 7.0 is now GA. Now we can finally take a look at all the new features in detail. This fourth part is about the rest :-).

Flash Redirection for Windows Horizon Clients (Tech Preview)

Flash content in an Internet Explorer browser is sent to the Windows-based client and played in a Flash container window, thereby offloading demand on the ESXi host.
Configured through an agent-side group policy that specifies a white list of Web sites to use Flash Redirection.

VMware Horizon 7 bring Flash redirection in tech preview, Flash redirection is the ability to use the client to render the Flash content. The content is still fetched server-side and sent to the client. This is a major difference to what Citrix was offering where they would give the possibility to get the content by the client.

This feature seems to be have brought back because it was introduced back in 2013 in VMware Horizon View 5.2 Feature Pack 2 - but there are differences. Although the name of this feature is similar to the feature called Flash URL Redirection, there are important differences, as described in the following table.

Comparison of the Flash Redirection Feature and Flash URL Redirection
Item of Differentiation	Flash Redirection	Flash URL Redirection
Support level	As a Tech Preview feature, no technical support is offered	Fully supported
Horizon Client types that support this feature	Windows client only	Windows client and Linux client
Display protocol required	PCoIP	PCoIP
Browsers	Internet Explorer 9, 10, or 11 for the agent (remote desktop)	All browsers that are currently supported on Horizon Client and Horizon Agent
Configuration mechanism	Use an agent-side GPO to specify a white list of Web sites that will use Flash Redirection

Modify the source code on the Web page to embed the required JavaScript

Feature Limitations

The Flash Redirection feature has the following limitations:

■	Clicking a URL link inside the Flash Player window opens a browser on the client rather than in the remote desktop (agent side).
■	The following Flash functionality does not work with Flash Redirection: Autoplay, the Next and Previous buttons, and Theater mode.
■	Some Web sites do not work with Flash Redirection on some browser versions. For example, the vimeo.com Web site does not work if you use Internet Explorer 11.
■	Flash and Java scripting might not work as expected.
■	The Flash Player window might not resize correctly if you resize the browser window or the Horizon Client window.
■	The Horizon Client window might freeze while playing Flash content, although you can set a Windows Registry key to work around this issue. On a 32-bit client, set HKLM\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\Client\EnableD3DRenderer value to "FALSE" and on a 64-bit client, setHKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\Client\EnableD3DRenderer to "FALSE".

Windows Server 2016 Support (Tech Preview)

Windows Server 2016 can be used as an RDS host for providing remote desktops and hosted applications.For this release, Windows Universal apps are not supported as hosted remote applications. For example, Universal apps do not appear in the list of apps provided by a Windows Server 2016 RDS farm. Universal apps, such as the Microsoft Edge browser or the Calculator included with Windows 10 or a Windows Server 2016 RDS host, are built on the Universal Windows Platform (UWP). Universal apps require Windows Explorer to be run. In addition, manually launching Universal apps through the Command Prompt will show an error message.

Horizon 7 for Linux Desktops

Support for SLED 11 SP3/SP4. However, Single Sign-on is not supported.
Support for HTML Access 4.0.0 on Chrome.
Support for CentOS 7.1 Linux distribution.
Support to check the dependency packages unique to a Linux distribution before installing Horizon Agent.
Support to use the Subnet option of /etc/vmware/viewagent-custom.conf to specify the subnet used for Linux desktop connections with multiple subnets connected.

Additional Features

View Administrator security protection layer: basically allowing you to use a Flash-free version of the View Admin UI - but it is a manual proces with some important caveats.

Protection against inadvertent pool deletion: if you want to stop administrators from deleting a desktop pool that currently has active desktops within it. With VMware Horizon 6.x and earlier versions, it was possible for an administrator to accidentally delete a desktop pool and all the VM’s within that pool. This new feature, when enabled, will stop that from happening.

It is a pretty hefty manual exercise though to enable it: http://vdelboysview.com/2016/03/22/horizon-7-desktop-pool-deletion-feature/

RDS per-device licensing improvements: helps to prevent a single client device connecting to RDS desktops and applications over PCoIP or HTML Access using up more than one RDS Per Device Client Access License (CAL): https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2076660

Support for Intel vDGA: only the Haswell and Broadwell series of Intel integrated GPUs are supported. Broadwell integrated GPUs are supported only on vSphere 6 Update 1b and later. Haswell integrated GPUs are supported on vSphere 5.5 and later. Multiple-monitor support is limited to no more than 3 monitors.

Support for AMD Multiuser GPU Using vDGA: support for multiuser solution based om AMD hardware. it is based on SR-IOV technology and supported with the following graphics cards; S7100X, S7150 and S7150X2.

Display scaling for Windows Horizon Clients: DPI scaling is supported if it is set at the system level and the scaling level is greater than 100.