Today’s social and mobile trends are driving the adoption of collaboration technologies, and forcing a re-definition of the traditional workspace. Data center convergence is creating one integrated fabric where networking, storage, and compute are virtualized and seamlessly managed. Also, as important, convergence is occurring on the “front end” – where voice, data, application mobility and video content are tightly integrated in tools like the VMware Horizon View Feature Pack. The VMware Horizon View 5.3 Feature pack is a free add-on to the Horizon View platform that enables support for following additional features.
Flash URL Redirection Flash URL Redirection intercepts and redirects a ShockWave Flash (SWF) file from the remote desktop to the client endpoint. Without this feature, multicast video data is streamed from an Adobe Media Server to the virtual desktops running on ESXi hosts. The data is then resent in individual PCoIP sessions from each virtual desktop to each client endpoint. Flash URL Redirection allows Flash content from Adobe Media Server to stream directly to the client endpoints and bypass the virtual desktop infrastructure. The Flash content is then displayed using the clients' local Flash media players. Streaming Flash content directly from the Adobe Media Server to the client endpoints lowers the load on the datacenter ESXi host, removes the extra routing through the datacenter, and reduces the bandwidth required to simultaneously stream Flash content to multiple client endpoints.
Real-Time Audio-Video allows Horizon View users to run Skype, WebEx, Google Hangouts, and other online conferencing applications on their virtual desktops. With Real-Time Audio-Video, webcam and audio devices that are connected locally to the client system are redirected to the remote desktop. This feature redirects video and audio data to the desktop with a significantly lower bandwidth than can be achieved by using USB redirection. Real-Time Audio-Video is compatible with standard conferencing applications and supports standard webcams, audio USB devices, and analog audio input. This feature installs the VMware Virtual Webcam and VMware Virtual Microphone on the desktop operating system. When a conferencing application is launched, it displays and uses these VMware virtual devices, which handle the audio-video redirection from the locally-connected devices on the client. The VMware Virtual Microphone also appears in the Device Manager on the desktop operating system. The drivers for the audio and webcam devices must be installed on your Horizon View Client systems to enable the redirection. Real-Time Audio-Video is not supported on local mode desktops. VMware Horizon View Feature Pack provides an ADM Template file that lets you install Real-Time Audio-Video group policy settings on Active Directory or on individual desktops. With these settings, you can change the webcam's default maximum frame rate and image resolution, and you can disable or enable the feature altogether
Unity Touch is software that provides a touch screen user interface (UI) for smartphones or tablets running Windows from a virtual machine (VM). Unity touch makes a virtualized application behave as if it is running natively on its host machine. Unity Touch allows end users to open folders, applications and documents by tapping icons, just as they would to open an app in the native mobile OS. In addition, the sidebar allows users to switch from working in one running application to another.
Windows 7 Multimedia Redirection Customers using Windows 7 desktops with Horizon View can now leverage multimedia redirection for video playback. Multimedia redirection provides a smoother video playback experience, lowers bandwidth usage substantially and improves server scalability for customers. In earlier Horizon View releases, MMR has been supported only on Windows XP and Windows Vista desktops
Support for Windows Server 2008 R2 desktops View 5.3 will let you use Windows Server as a the guest Operating System VM in place of using Windows 7 or 8. Microsoft does not provide SPLA licensing model for the Windows desktop operating system such as Windows 7 or 8 to allow customers and service providers to create Desktop-as-a-Service offerings using enterprise grade VDI solutions such as Horizon View. So if you're a provider who wants to sell Windows desktops as a service, then your only options are (1) for the customer to "bring their own" Windows desktop licenses, or (2) for you to provide a Server desktop via an RDSH SPLA CAL which you configure to look like a normal client desktop. Conversely Windows Server 2008 does provide a SPLA licensing model and enable customers and service providers to be in alignment with Microsoft licensing terms. So now Customers can share the hardware infrastructure across multiple tenants i.e. they can use a single server and run windows 2008 server VM's for a bunch of end customers. This is highly beneficial to Service Provider customers. In addition the Horizon View Feature pack only supports Remote Experience Agent installer, Real-Time Audio-Video, Unity Touch, and HTML Access, Other Feature Pack components are not supported on this desktop OS.
Support for Windows 8.1 Horizon View now fully supports Windows 8.1 virtual desktops. It also comes aligned with the Windows 8.1 client support. Please note that currently Local Mode and View Persona Management features are not supported with Windows 8.1 desktop. From VMware Horizon View Feature Pack Remote Experience Agent installer, with the Unity Touch and Real-Time Audio-Video components, is supported on Windows 8.1 desktops.
