Home Enterprise VMWare Horizon 7.9 & CART 5.1 Released

VMWare Horizon 7.9 & CART 5.1 Released

by Adam Armstrong

VMware released the latest version of its VDI software, VMware Horizon version 7.9. The new release comes with several new features and enhancements including enhancements to Horizon Connection Server and Horizon Agent. VMware also released the latest version of CART, version 5.1, its client software used to connect to a Horizon desktop or application.


VMware released the latest version of its VDI software, VMware Horizon version 7.9. The new release comes with several new features and enhancements including enhancements to Horizon Connection Server and Horizon Agent. VMware also released the latest version of CART, version 5.1, its client software used to connect to a Horizon desktop or application.

As stated, the main changes are to both Horizon Connection Server and Horizon Agent. New enhancements include the company continuing to build on the feature parity of Horizon Console, the HTML5-based web console that will eventually replace Horizon Administrator. Horizon Console has several new enhancements around usability making it faster and easier for users. These include:

  • Add, edit, or remove an instant-clone domain administrator.
  • View the number of published desktop sessions for farms or registered machines.
  • Configure event reporting and monitor events.
  • Monitor published desktop and application sessions.
  • Configure smart card authentication. 
  • Perform enhanced role-based delegated administration including privileges and roles for custom roles in Horizon Console.
  • The Horizon Console user interface contains updated icons.
  • View the image, pending image, and task columns for an RDS host for a farm.
  • Configure the multi-session mode feature for published applications.
  • Configure global settings that affect client sessions and connections and set global security settings for client sessions and connections in Horizon Console.
  • Select whether and when to refresh the OS disks when creating an instant-clone desktop pool.
  • Determine whether to allow ESXi hosts to reclaim unused disk space on instant clones that are created in space-efficient disk format when creating an instant-clone desktop pool. The space reclamation feature reduces the total storage space required for instant clone desktops.
  • Publish and launch Universal Windows Platform (UWP) applications.
  • Change or remove the icon of a published application.

Other changes to Horizon Connection Server include enabling users to configure additional options in Horizon Administrator such as "Always", "Log to file on error (default)", and "Never" to enable event log messages to be generated and stored in Syslog format in log files. Users can publish and launch UWP applications now. And users are now able to select when they want to refresh the OS disks on their instant clones.  

With CART, the new updates allow for the HTML client to run on Samsung Tizen 4.0 and 5.0 TVS. For those using the Android client there is now a 64-bit version. The MacOS client is now able to specify on which displays it can be used on and it now supports VMware Integrated Printing. The new Linux client leverages H.264 decoding for lower power usage, it also supports VMware Integrated Printing, has HTML5 video redirection, and like the MacOS client, specifies which displays where it will run. 

VMware Horizon

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