Tech conferences always bring announcements about new products, partnerships, and capabilities. This year’s Nutanix .Next conference is no exception, and it is starting off with a huge announcement about Omnissa Horizon.

Omnissa Horizon is adding support for Nutanix AHV, providing customers building on-premises virtual desktops and applications environments with the choice of hypervisor for their end-user computing workloads.

Horizon customers will also have the opportunity to participate in the Beta of this new feature. Signup for the beta is available on the Omnissa Beta site.

I’m not at the .Next conference this week, but I have heard from attendees that the Horizon on AHV session was well attended and included a lot of technical details including a reference architecture showing Horizon running on both Nutanix AHV and VMware vSphere in on-premises and cloud scenarios. The session also covered desktop provisioning, and Horizon on Nutanix will include a desktop provisioning model similar to “Mode B Instant Clones” using Nutanix’s cloning technologies.

Horizon on AHV reference architecture. Picture courtesy of Dane Young

My Thoughts

So what do I think about Horizon on Nutanix AHV? I’m excited for this announcement. Now that Omnissa is an independent company, they have the opportunity to diversify the platforms that Horizon supports. This is great for Horizon customers who are looking at on-premises alternatives to VMware vSphere and VCF in the aftermath of the Broadcom acquisition.

I have a lot of technical questions about Horizon on Nutanix, and I wasn’t at .Next to ask them. That’s why I’m signing up for the beta and planning to run this in my lab.

I’ve seen some great features added to both Horizon and Workspace ONE since they were spun out into their own company. These include support for Horizon 8 on VMware Cloud Director and Google Cloud and the Windows Server Management feature for Workspace ONE that is currently in beta.

If you want to learn more about Horizon on Nutanix AHV, I would check out the blog post that was released this morning. If you run Nutanix in production or use Nutanix CE in your home lab, you can register for the beta.