VMware Inc. has announced some updates to its virtual desktop infrastructure and desktop-as-a-service platform Horizon that it says will make it easier to manage hybrid and multicloud environments.

More specifically, today’s updates should help information technology teams that have to manage fleets of virtual desktops and applications at a time when remote work policies remain in flux, VMware said. The company believes there’s a big need for it, as it pointed to a six-week period in early 2020 when companies first shifted to remote work, where cloud-hosted Horizon desktops grew by 82%.

The most interesting new feature in VMware Horizon is called “Universal Brokering”, which is designed to match workers with the best available virtual machine by analyzing parameters such as location and spare capacity. Teams that use Horizon on the Azure VMware Solution, VMware Cloud on AWS and Microsoft Azure will be able to rely on Universal Brokering to better balance resource loads and help users to find the best match, VMware said.

The update also means Horizon now supports larger pods, or groups of virtual machines, which should help to simplify the distribution of workloads. Operators will now be able to manage pods as large as 20,000 virtual machines. That should simplify workload management as teams can support fewer but larger pods.

Creating desktop images and distributing those across local and cloud-based pods also gets easier, VMware said. It has introduced new tools that automate the task of packaging applications with operating systems before deploying them, and can now do this in real-time.

Some VDI users may get better graphics too. The new Blast protocol that carries screen imagery from the virtual machine to clients now supports higher resolution and high dynamic range. In addition, it has added support for Nvidia Corp.’s Ampere graphics processing units, so teams can take advantage of that hardware.

VMware said Horizon also now works with the popular open-source database Postgre. That was done at the request of users that want to avoid the licensing costs of proprietary databases, VMware said.

Finally, VMware said it will soon enable remote support for Horizon sessions through VMware Workspace ONE Assist, a service that lets IT and help desk staff remotely assist employees with device tasks and issues. At present Workspace ONE Assist only works with physical PCs and special purpose frontline devices. That additional support will be added sometime in the third quarter, VMware said.

Shankar Iyer, senior vice president and general manager of End-User Computing at VMware, said that with more and more apps moving to the cloud, and employees accessing them from everywhere, IT teams have to manage more complex environments than before.

Today’s updates, he said, will “reduce this complexity, increase management efficiency and improve employee productivity regardless of whether the desktop and application workloads are on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid of both.”

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