VMware
announced that they're Challenging Citrix head on in the XenApp space by adding
RDSH session support and published apps to VMware Horizon, all accessible via
PCoIP VMware
just entered a race that Citrix started many years ago. Yesterday VMware
announced Horizon 6 Few Features includes:
o Hybrid cloud, enabled by our acquisition of
Desktone last year and now our Horizon DaaS offering, allows you to easily
deploy virtual desktops on-prem, off-prem, or whatever combination suits your
fancy.
o Combining Horizon View, Horizon Mirage, and
VMware Fusion, we can offer integrated and centralized desktop management
across virtual, physical, and bring-your-own devices.
o We’ve upped the ante for enterprise management
with enhanced image management features in Horizon Mirage and integrations into
vCenter Operations Manager, vCenter Orchestrator, and vCloud Automation Center.
o Virtual SAN is now integrated and supported,
helping to drive down storage costs while maintaining performance and SLA.
o The biggest and most exciting part of the
announcement is that Horizon View now supports application publishing.
This has been a feature request long-requested and long in the making.
VMware
has finally shipped a SBC product , SBC stands for Server-based computing aka
RDSH (Remote Desktop Session Host) or RDS (Remote Desktop Services) or TS
(Terminal Services). So why
should anyone care about VMware releasing a product that has been around
forever. For one, we all know VDI is not a silver bullet technology. Right now
VDI adoption is teetering around 5% of total enterprise market share, and if
you are in the group of orgs using it you tend to find a sweet spot of usage
for about 20-30% of your organization. SBCs market is much bigger and VMware
just entered it… but Citrix created it. The
story goes that somehow in the 90s Citrix has able to secure the source code
for Windows NT and they redesigned the OS to support multiple sessions on the
same OS. This was typical in Unix mainframes but had never been done for
Windows. Microsoft then bought the code back from Citrix and released Windows
NT Terminal Services. Microsoft and Citrix spent the next decade being best of
buddies. What
VMware has done in Horizon 6 is create a true competitive product to XenApp.
The reason Horizon 6 is a true competitor to XenApp is that they are the first
product that has done the work to create a 3rd Party Protocol
Provider for RDS. What is
a 3PPP, it’s the official way to create a protocol that works with RDSH. It’s
how ICA works with RDSH to bring you XenApp, or how RDP works (but RDP wouldn’t
be third party). Up until now, any vendor in this space has not done the work
to create a true 3PPP interface instead most products have just either used
virtual channels on RDP or they’ve done some transcoding of RDP.
How
this works is that Windows talks to a graphics driver which then takes all the
content being created and encodes it into a protocol. Microsoft uses its own
protocol, RDP, Citrix uses ICA/HDX, VMware uses PCoIP/Blast
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