VMware Horizon View 5.3 is available

At VMworld 2013 in Barcelona VMware announced the new version of their EUC product Horizon View 5.3.

VMware Horizon View 5.3 includes a significant number of new or improved features.

Direct Pass-through Graphics
Virtual Dedicated Graphics Acceleration (vDGA) is a graphics acceleration capability that is offered by VMware with NVIDIA GPUs and this is now supported by Horizon View 5.3. This enables customers to deliver high-end 3D-grade graphics for use cases where a discrete GPU is needed. vDGA graphics adapters can be installed in the underlying vSphere host and are then assigned to virtual desktops. Assigning a discrete NVIDIA GPU to the virtual Machine dedicates the entire GPU to that desktop and includes support for CUDA and OpenGL.

Windows 8.1 Support
My experience with Windows 8.1 is not that positive but VMware already included full support in Horizon View 5.3. This comes aligned with the Windows 8.1 client support in vSphere 5.5. Important: Local Mode and View Persona Management features are not supported with Windows 8.1 desktops yet.

Multi Media Redirection (MMR) for H264 encoded media files to Windows 7 clients
VMware added support for multimedia redirection of H264 encoded Windows Media files to Windows 7 client end-points. H.264/MPEG-4 is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high-definition video. When using this Windows 7 endpoints will receive the original compressed multimedia stream from the server and decode it locally for display. This can decrease bandwidth usage since the data over the wire will be compressed video instead of a uncompressed screen information and it also decreases used server resources, because the server no longer use server CPU resources decoding the video content.

HTML5 access improvements
With Horizon View 5.2 it was possible to use a VDI desktop without installing client software by using delivered through HTML5 capable web-browsers. With Horizon View 5.3 VMware has further improved this feature so users can now enjoy sound, clipboard access and a improved graphics performance.

Real-time audio-video (webcam/audio redirection) for Linux clients
With Horizon View 5.3 VMware introduces real-time audio and video support for Linux clients (support for Windows client was already in 5.2). Real-time audio and video does not forward audio and webcam devices using USB. Instead the devices are controlled by the local client, and audio- and video-streams are transferred from the local devices and encoded, delivered back to the guest virtual machine, and decoded.
Audio delivery is performed from the standard View agent audio-out functionality, which provides better audio quality than with USB redirection.

iOS 7 look & feel for iPhone/iPad client
The iOS client now matches the look and feel of iOS 7, released at the beginning of October.

USB 3.0 port support
Horizon View 5.3 offers USB port redirection support for USB 3.0 client ports.

Support for Windows Server 2008 VM based desktops
Strange but true, Windows Server 2008 R2 is now supported as desktop operating system. Why? Well Microsoft does not offer SPLA licensing for Windows desktop operating systems to allow service providers to create Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) offerings using VMware Horizon View.
Microsoft does offer SPLA licensing for Windows Server 2008, so this allows service providers to be fully compatible with the Microsoft licensing terms.
Important to know is that some features are currently not supported with Windows Server 2008 R2, check the release notes.

Support for VMware Horizon Mirage
This is the first step in creating a single desktop image delivery system. Administrators can now utilize VMware Horizon Mirage 4.3 to manage Horizon View virtual desktops. Mirage keeps a centralized and de-duplicated copy of virtual desktops, including user’s applications and data, and is able to re-instantiate them should you have a host or site failure. Mirage can also distribute individual and departmental application layers. With Horizon Mirage IT is effectively able to eliminate the need for complex namespace or application virtualization solutions.

VCAI production ready
View Composer Array Integration is now a fully supported feature. VCAI allows administrators to take advantage of native storage snapshot features. VCAI integrate with NAS storage partner’s native cloning capabilities using vSphere vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). VCAI speeds up provisioning of virtual desktops while offloads CPU consumption and network bandwidth.

Linked-Clone Desktop Pool Storage Overcommit enhancements
The linked-clone desktop pool storage overcommit feature includes a new storage overcommit level called Unbounded. When selected, View Manager does not limit the number of linked-clone desktops that it creates based on the physical capacity of the datastore.
Important: note that the unbound policy should only be selected if you are certain that the datastore in use has enough storage capacity to accommodate future growth.

Supportability improvements for View Persona Management
With Horizon View 5.3 View Persona Management feature includes several supportability improvements, including additional log messages, profile size and file and folder count tracking, and a new group policy setting called Add the Administrators group to redirected folders. View Manager uses the file and folder counts to suggest folders for folder redirection.

Oracle 11.2.0.3 database support
In addition to the supported databases listed in the installation documentation, VMware Horizon View 5.3 supports Oracle 11.2.0.3 databases.
vSAN for VMware Horizon View
As of version 5.3 VMware includes vSAN for Horizon View desktops in the Horizon Suite. vSAN reduces storage cost for VDI deployments by using inexpensive server disks for shared storage. It also can improve performance because vSAN uses SSD caching for read and write and provides intelligent data placement within a vSphere cluster. vSAN is a scale-out converged platform and a hybrid storage solution combining SSD and traditional disks. Because it fully integrates with the vSphere kernel it has very low latency.
Because VSAN is in beta release, this feature is being released as a Tech Preview, which means that it is available for you to try, but it is not recommended for production use and no technical support is provided.

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