VMware Horizon DaaS 7

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VMware has renewed their cloud offering a few weeks ago to Horizon Cloud service. In addition to the VMware managed solutions; either Hosted (formerly know as Horizon Air) or Hybrid (On-Premises infrastructure for Desktops & Apps), they now have released Horizon DaaS 7.

In a previous blog post, I have written about VMware Horizon DaaS and how this differs from the well known Virtual Desktop platform Horizon View. Link

In this new blog post series, I will dive into the new features.

What’s New:

With the release of DaaS version 7, a few new features are added to the product:

  • New tenant Administrative Console (Horizon Admin replaces the Enterprise Center)
  • Helpdesk Console (HACA, as Beta Feature)
  • New Service Provider features, such as:
    • A new maintenance tab
    • Image Sync for desktop managers
    • Crypto-Agility in Horizon DaaS Appliance
  • VMware Identity Manager Integration for version 2.8 and 2.8.1
  • App Volumes support (as Beta Feature)

Other new options found:

  • Resource allocation for appliances is increased from 1 vCPU to 2 vCPU and 3 GB memory to 4 GB memory
  • Updated REST APIs
  • Access Point 2.7.2, 2.8 and 2.8.1 are now supported
  • Direct Connect agent is no longer needed
  • New DaaS health agent
  • View agent 7.0.2 is supported
  • TLS 1.0 is no longer enabled by default
  • VXLAN support
  • New Desktop models with GPU video memory settings

New Administrative Console

The Enterprise Console which was used in previously versions of Horizon DaaS to administer things as Active Directory integration, Desktop or Application pools, assignments, tenants etc. is now replaced with the Horizon Admin Console.

People familiar with Horizon Cloud (formerly Air) will probably recognize this console, as this console is already available for quite some time in Horizon Cloud. It is a console based on the new interface called Astro which will be the unified console for managing multiple Horizon products.

The new Horizon Admin Console

Helpdesk Console

The new Helpdesk Console is provided as Beta feature within this release. Within this console a tenant administrator will be able to:

  • View a console session
  • Power manage a VM
  • Extract log files
  • Perform a Health Scan to check the current state of the environment
  • Provide remote assistance
  • Create and view usage reports
  • View logging
The new Helpdesk Console known as HACA (Beta)

Service Provider features:

Maintenance tab

Functions previously performed in dt-console are now performed on the new Maintenance page in the Service Center; Fail Over, Slony operations and Upgrade operations.

New Maintenance tab in Version 7.0

Image Sync

In larger deployments multiple desktop managers can be registered to a single tenant. With this new option you can now;

  • Duplicate images across Desktop Managers without manually cloning and importing the images.
  • Sync changes to images across Desktop Managers without making the changes on all copies.
New option to sync images across desktop managers.

Crypto-Agility

Within this new release, it is now possible to configure network listeners for cipher suites and TLS protocol versions on DaaS appliances. These listeners need to be configured at:

  • Sfcb
  • Java
  • Tomcat
  • Postgres
  • Nginx
  • DaaS Agent

A document describing these step is available within the documentation section of Horizon DaaS 7 on the VMware website. Link

The release notes for Horizon DaaS 7 can be found here: link