Support for Windows Server 2019, macOS 10.14, Android 9.1 and more…

VMWare’s Horizon 7.7 release slipped out with little fanfare shortly before Christmas.

The virtual desktop infrastructure platform (VDI) – designed to help IT administrators extend virtualisation from the data centre to a variety of endpoint devices – comes with a host of new features that deserve more attention than IT managers with half an eye on the holidays may have given them.

Chief among them, welcome support for Windows Server 2019 – for both desktop and Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH) server virtual machines (VMs). Also new: support for recent OS releases, including macOS 10.14 (Mojave) and Android 9.1 and a host of scalability, security and UX enhancements.

Here’s what else is new.

What’s New in VMWare Horizon 7.7

Mware Horizon 7.7 adds support for December 12. 2018’s VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 1, which itself added a Burst Filter to manage event bursts and prevent the database of vCenter Server from flooding with identical events over a short period of time.

vSphere’s 6.7 update also added support for vMotion: the company’s tool that allows user to move a virtual machine from one physical server to another; the latest update allows users to switch between on-prem systems and VMware Cloud on AWS.

That move follows the AWS’ Outposts venture, announced in November, which allows for the use of Amazon-branded server hardware to host AWS cloud services on-premises, and management of that hardware through VMware Cloud.

(The two are eyeing an environment in which on-prem Kubernetes-orchestrated applications can expand into the public cloud if necessary, then move back on-prem when demand subsides; the hybrid cloud vision that is growing in popularity.)

Management Console Improvements

New Horizon Console (the new HTML5 console) additions allow users to add manual desktop pools (a group of virtual desktops that are hosted on identically configured VMs) and View Composer linked-clone desktop pools (pools of desktops that use the same base system-disk image, using less storage than full VMs).

These tasks and a number of others previous required the use of a Flash-based management console called Horizon Administrator.

VMWare’s Caroline Arakelian added in a blog on the updates: “On the Machines page, you can quickly identify when someone other than the assigned user is connected to a VM. Rather than having just one column called User, there are now two columns: a Connected User column and an Assigned User column. This feature is also available in Horizon Administrator.”

Other updates include single sign-on support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) desktops and support for Linux desktops on VMware Cloud on AWS.

For the full list of tweaks, including scalability and security enhancements, VMware’s release notes are here.