omnissa

Omnissa Horizon on Nutanix AHV

/ seanpmassey

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.

Introducing Omnissa – The Future Home of Horizon and Workspace ONE Launches Today!

/ seanpmassey

Back in December 2023, Hock Tan announced that he would be looking to divest the entity that is the “soon-to-be-formerly-known-as the VMware EUC Business Unit.” Speculation ran rampant about possible buyers until the end of February when KKR announced that they had agreed to buy the EUC business for $3.8 billion USD and that it would become a standalone business.

That also led to a new round of speculation. What would the new entity be called? When would they stand on their own? How would Broadcom’s “Day 2” impact EUC during the divestiture process?

The future of “the business unit formerly known as VMware EUC” is now starting to come into focus as we get answers to these questions. While the divestiture is still in process and the expected closing date is unknown, we now formally know the new company’s name – Omnissa.

The Omnissa name (which is pronounced ahm-NISS-uh) was formally announced in a blog post by End-User Computing Vice President of Product and Technical Marketing Renu Upadhyay on April 25th, 2024. The blog post also includes the Omnissa vision statement and some background on how the name was selected.

Today (Monday, May 6th 2024), the Omnissa website and other selected sites have started to go live. While the acquisition has not closed, Broadcom has started the process of migrating the legacy VMware systems into Broadcom’s systems, and the EUC systems will be migrated into standalone systems to help support the future independent organization. Broadcom has posted a KB for this here: https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?legacyId=97841

The following sites are live as of the time of this post, although not all features and functionality might be working.

In addition to the above links, redirects from the VMware website are being put in place for Horizon and Workspace ONE focused pages so that old URLs will continue to work.

So what do I think of the new branding? The first time I heard the name, I wondered who the Warhammer 40K fan was on the marketing team as Omnissa sounds a lot like the name of something from that game universe.

The more I think about the name and the branding that was announce today, the more I like it. It feels all-encompassing…like it pulls together all of the former VMware EUC products. And I am a big fan of the Omnissa Mission Statement. It is very customer and end-user focused, and I think it directly ties back to the product portfolio and the capabilities they can deliver.

So congratulations to the Omnissa team on the first step of your new brand launch. I’m looking forward to seeing more as you take the next steps on your independent journey.

(Note: I am not a Warhammer 40K fan…but as a general science-fiction and speculative fiction fan, I am familiar with some of that series lore. The only Warhammer I like comes from a completely different science fiction universe.)