VentureBeat: It seems like this is part of a big effort to make Horizon run seamlessly over a wide variety of platforms, from the local hardware down the hall to the instances in some cloud across the country. To get a better understanding of how VMWare thinks this will affect their users, we spent a few minutes discussing the new enhancements with Sachin Sharma, VMware’s director of product marketing. Some companies have been requesting the option to avoid the license costs of proprietary databases. Horizon will also work with PostgreSQL, a popular open source database. It will also support the latest NVIDIA Ampere GPUs to allow teams to take advantage of the best hardware. The Blast protocol that carries screen imagery from the virtual machine to the clients will now carry higher resolution and HDR imagery. Some of the new features target less visible layers. The tools automate the job of packaging applications with operating system images and then deploying them, often in real-time.

The new roll out will also simplify the chores associated with creating desktop images and distributing them across local and cloud-based pods.

Pods as large as 20000 virtual machines will now be manageable, allowing IT teams to simplify their job by supporting fewer, larger pods. Distributing this load will also get a bit simpler because the new version of Horizon will also support larger pods, the term used for groups of virtual machines.

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