October 3, 2023

On July 13th Dell announced the next version of vWorkspace 8.6 at the Microsoft WPC. This version will be available end of this month.

It really has a lot of new features that even can save a lot of money when it comes to SCVMM management. Here is the full list:

Internationalization

  • Added Unicode support for vWorkspace core products such as the Connection Broker and Web Access as well as the connectors.
  • Localization
    • Localized connectors for Chinese, Japanese, Korean.
  • WSM
    • Layering support via PowerShell
      • Integrate virtual layers into a vWorkspace virtual desktop to separate departmental applications from the virtual desktop’s operating system.
    • User Profile Layering
      • Captures user profile data in a layer that can be accessed from any device.
    • Hot High Availability
      • Allows client streamed by WSM to seamlessly switch to a different WSM server in the event of failure.
    • Centralized Site Management
      • Provides single management UI for all WSM Sites.
  • Advanced Hyper-v integration
    • Full clone provisioning with Hyper-v
      • This direct integration with Windows Server Hyper-V adds support for provisioning of full, persistent virtual machines where previous versions of vWorkspace HyperDeploy only supported differencing disk clones.
    • High availability of Hyper-V hosts
      • When using a Hyper-V cluster as the compute engine for your vWorkspace virtual desktops you have the option to set the virtual machines to be available across the cluster (High Availability).
  • vWorkspace Connectors
    • Connector for Google ChromeOS
      • This connector for ChromeOS provides a more native user experience than HTML5 and shall be available via the Google Chrome Web Store.
    • Simplification
      • Complete streamline of the vWorkspace Connectors’ user interface to improve end user ease of use.
    • Email-based configuration
      • Only thing user needs to know to obtain a configuration is their email and password.
    • 64-bit
      • Support for 64-bit Remote Desktop extensions (virtual channels)
  • vWorkspace Connector for Windows – drag and drop
    • Allows authorized users to drag files and content from their Windows PC and drop them into vWorkspace desktops and applications.  This simplifies common workflows. For example; insurance agents can now drag files directly into the correct claim record of their hosted CRM application. This functionality is not available in the Windows native Remote Desktop Connection.
  • Monitoring and diagnostics
    • Monitoring of Microsoft Remote Desktop Licensing Service infrastructure
    • Monitoring of vWorkspace WSM infrastructure