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VMware Horizon 7.0

VMware Official Links for Horizon 7.0.1


Release Notes

Software Download

New Features:

Instant Clones

  • A new type of desktop virtual machines that can be provisioned significantly faster than the traditional View Composer linked clones.
  • A fully functional desktop can be provisioned in two seconds or less.
  • Recreating a desktop pool with a new OS image can be accomplished in a fraction of the time it takes a View Composer desktop pool because the parent image can be prepared well ahead of the scheduled time of pool recreation.
  • Clones are automatically rebalanced across available datastores.
  • View storage accelerator is automatically enabled.

Cloud Pod Architecture Improvements

  • The Cloud Pod Architecture feature now supports a pod federation of up to 25 pods across up to five sites for a scale of 50,000 sessions.
  • In the event that resources at a user's home site are exhausted or otherwise not available, the user is now automatically directed to available desktops at other sites.
  • Home site administration is now fully supported in View Administrator.
  • The Cloud Pod Architecture feature now allows home site assignments for nested AD security groups.
  • VMware Identity Manager is now fully integrated with the Cloud Pod Architecture feature.

Smart Policies

  • Control of the clipboard cut-and-paste, client drive redirection, USB redirection, and virtual printing desktop features through defined policies.
  • PCoIP session control through PCoIP profiles.
  • Conditional policies based on user location, desktop tagging, pool name, and Horizon Client registry values.

VMware Blast Extreme

  • VMware Blast Extreme is now fully supported on the Horizon platform.
    • Administrators can select the VMware Blast display protocol as the default or available protocol for pools, farms, and entitlements.
    • End users can select the VMware Blast display protocol when connecting to remote desktops and applications.
  • VMware Blast Extreme features include:
    • TCP and UDP transport support
    • H.264 support for the best performance across more devices
    • Reduced device power consumption for longer battery life
    • NVIDIA GRID acceleration for more graphical workloads per server, better performance, and a superior remote user experience

    True SSO

    • For VMware Identity Manager integration, True SSO streamlines the end-to-end login experience. After users log in to VMware Identity Manager using a smart card or an RSA SecurID or RADIUS token, users are not required to also enter Active Directory credentials in order to use a remote desktop or application.
    • Uses a short-lived Horizon virtual certificate to enable a password-free Windows login.
    • Supports using either a native Horizon Client or HTML Access.
    • System health status for True SSO appears in the View Administrator dashboard.
    • Can be used in a single domain, in a single forest with multiple domains, and in a multiple-forest, multiple-domain setup.

    Access Point 2.5 Integration

    • Smart card authentication is now fully supported.
    • RSA SecurID and RADIUS authentication have been added.
    • Smart policies can be used with Access Point.
    • VMware Blast protocol can now be directed to port 443. Previously, port 8443 was required.
    Note: Access Point 2.6 version serves as a reverse proxy for VMware Identity Manager only.

    URL Content Redirection for Windows Horizon Clients

    • For specific URLs, you can configure whether, when end users click a link to that URL in an Internet Explorer browser or an application, or if they type the URL into an Internet Explorer browser, that link gets opened always on a Windows-based client system or always in a remote desktop or application.
    • URL links can be links to Web pages, telephone numbers, email addresses, and more.
    • Configured through group policy.

    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.

    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

    • Support for IPv6 with VMware Blast Extreme on security servers.
    • View Administrator security protection layer. See VMware Knowledge Base (KB) article 2144303 for more information.
    • Protection against inadvertent pool deletion.
    • RDS per-device licensing improvements.
    • Support for Intel vDGA.
    • Support for AMD Multiuser GPU Using vDGA.
    • More resilient upgrades.
    • 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.

Resolved Issues:

RDS Desktops and Applications

  • A single client device connecting to RDS desktops and applications over PCoIP could use up more than one RDS Per Device Client Access License (CAL). This issue is resolved by the RDS per-device licensing improvements feature.

Access Point

  • If Access Point was configured to use smart card authentication and you also set an idle session timeout for View Connection Server, then after the idle session timeout period elapses, you could no longer log in again. For example, if the idle session timeout was set to 3 minutes and you left the session idle for more than 3 minutes, when the session timeout dialog box appeared and you clicked "Continue," you were prompted to enter Active Directory credentials rather than a smart card PIN. Even if you entered AD credentials, the status displayed "Authenticating ..." and froze.
  • In Access Point 2.0, smart card authentication is a Tech Preview feature, meaning that you can use smart card authentication in a test environment but not in a production environment, and technical support is not available for this Tech Preview feature. Smart card authentication is fully supported in Access Point 2.5.
  • Smart card authentication did not work if you used View Administrator to configure a pre-login message. If a pre-login message was configured in View Administrator, when you logged in using smart card authentication and you were prompted to confirm the pre-login message, after you confirmed the message, the pre-login message reappeared.
  • When you used the Access Point REST administration API, you could not use the "/v1/config/settings" resource to update authentication settings.
  • When deploying the Access Point appliance, either by using the command-line VMware OVF Tool or by using the deployment wizard, you had to enter only one DNS address. If you entered multiple addresses, DNS resolution did not work.
  • If you set the View Edge Setting "blastEnabled" to False, you are not able to access remote desktops and applications through HTML Access. Generally, because Access Point is deployed in a DMZ, the "blastEnabled" option is set to True, and this issue does not occur. If you want to set "blastEnabled" to False and also use HTML Access, you must also set the "proxyPattern" option to "/|/portal(.*)".

Horizon 7 for Linux Desktops

  • If you disconnect from a Linux desktop before the guest operating system has completed the log-in process, View Agent for Linux waits at least five minutes before logging off, even if the desktop pool setting, Automatically logoff after disconnect, is set to Immediately or to a waiting time that is less than five minutes.

Windows Media MMR

  • Windows Media MMR did not perform ideally on certain graphics cards, such as certain AMD models, which have slow video memory read back performance.

3D Graphics Acceleration

  • On AMD vDGA, the Autofit feature might stop working if the client window was resized to a resolution smaller than 640x480. This issue is resolved by upgrading to Horizon Client 4.0.1 or later.

Client Drive Redirection

  • When using client drive redirection (CDR) or file association (opening local files with a remote application) with the secure tunnel enabled, you might have encountered performance issues when transferring CDR data between Horizon clients and remote desktop machines.
  • If you disabled client drive redirection with the Microsoft Remote Desktop Services group policy setting, Do not allow drive redirection, users could still select the Options > Share Folders option in Horizon Client and use the UI to select shared drives. The drives were not shared and did not appear in the remote desktop. This issue did not occur if you did not install the Client Drive Redirection option when you installed View Agent.

Windows 10 and Windows 8.x Support

  • If you upgraded from a Windows 8.1 desktop to Windows 10, logged in to the desktop, and pressed a key on the login screen, Windows displayed a black screen and the desktop was unusable.
  • Windows 10 unmanaged machines were displayed as Windows 8 on the Registered Machines page in View Administrator.

View Persona Management

  • With Persona Management, if a folder was renamed or moved, and a program tried to access the folder or a file inside that folder at its original location, the folder, including its contents, was recreated at its original location. This issue often occurred with applications such as Microsoft Outlook and other email clients that frequently create and delete folders and files.

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