VMware Inc. today is announcing that it will make substantially all of its VMware Horizon virtual desktop infrastructure available on Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud. Previously the service was available only on Amazon Web Services Inc. infrastructure.

The move is part of a broad thrust by VMware to expand its end-user computing footprint to take advantage of the increased adoption of work-from-home arrangements in the wake of COVID-19. In January the company enhanced its Workspace ONE endpoint management technology to improve support for distributed workforces.

VDI is a technology that delivers the equivalent of a fully functional PC desktop to an end-user device. Because applications and data live on a server, the security risk is reduced and IT can fully control the desktop configuration.

VMware said it’s agnostic about where customers choose to deploy desktops. “Some customers have on-premises infrastructure and other customers want a pure cloud model,” said Sachin Sharma, director of product marketing in VMware’s end-user computing unit. “The sweet spot is in the middle: subscription licensing and cloud management of on-premise is workloads.  Is up to the customer to decide what they want to and don’t want to manage.”

Horizon supports multi-cloud deployment and zero trust security through the technology acquired with the purchase of Carbon Black Inc. two years ago. Carbon Black uses behavioral analytics technology to detect endpoint attacks.

Among the features of VMware service is a universal brokering feature that connects employees to the most appropriate cloud or pod based upon available capacity, location, preference and other factors. An image management service cuts down on maintenance by centrally storing and distributing images across Horizon environments.

An application management feature pre-packages applications once and deploys them across multiple horizon desktops in real-time. A cloud monitoring service keeps track of user sessions and balances performance accordingly. Lifecycle management enables automatic installation, upgrade and scaling of Horizon infrastructure.

In addition, VMware is announcing supports for the PostgreSQL relational database management system, which is the world’s fourth most popular RDBMS, according to DB-Engines.com. The company has actually supported PostgreSQL for some time but is only announcing it publicly now, Sharma. Previously, support was limited to Microsoft’s SQL Server.

The company is also making some improvements to the Blast protocol that is used to deliver screen displays remotely. Improvements include support for higher resolution displays, the latest generation of Nvidia Corp. graphic processing units and high-dynamic-range encoding for improved performance.

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