With the release of VMware Horizon 7 and User Environment Manager 9 VMware has introduced Smart Policy’s to help administrators manage their Virtual environments better and improve what users can get access to and from where.

Smart Policys can be set on the following conditions

• View Client Info (IP & Name)
• Endpoint location (Internal/External)
• Horizon Tags
• Desktop Pool name

Below is a list of the smart policy that can be set and how they can be used by the Horizon administrators.

Clipboard

• Enable
• Disable
• Allow Copy from Client to Agent
• Allow Copy from Agent to Client

Client Drive

• Disable
• Allow All
• Read Only

USB

• Enable
• Disable

Printing

• Enable
• Disable

PCoIP bandwidth profiles

• High-Speed (20 Mbps)
• LAN (10Mbps or Higher)
• Dedicated WAN (5Mbps default)
• Broadband WAN (2Mbps)
• Low-Speed (1Mbps)
• Extremely low-speed connections (up to 500Kbps)

The following table shows when to use the best bandwidth profile and for what use cases

	Description	BW(Mbps)	typical network	typical user
1	Best User Experience(workstation)	20	LAN	M&E CAD/CAM
2	Best User Experience(VDI)	10	LAN – MAN	Knowledge worker, video
3	Default Setting	5	WAN	Task worker, light video
4	Optimal User Experience	2	WAN	Office Apps
5	Prioritize Bandwidth	1	WAN	Basic Apps only
6	Minimum Bandwidth	0.5	WAN Low	Data Entry

The following table shows how the PCoIP profile is tuned based on the profile selected

GPO	1	2	3	4	5	6
Max Session BW (kbps)	9000	9000	9000	5000	2000	1000
Min Session BW (kbps)	100	100	100	100	100	100
Enable BTL	1	2	0	0	0	0
Max Initial Image Quality	100	90	80	70	70	70
Minimum Image Quality	50	50	40	40	30	30
Max FPS	60	30	30	20	15	5
Max Audio Bandwidth (kbps)	1600	1600	500	500	200	90
Image Quality performance.	50	50	50	50	25	0

 

To take advantage of these new Smart Policy you will need to use Horizon 7 and User Environment Manager 9 and have the latest Horizon Agents and Clients installed. It should also be noted that these policy only work with the PCoIP and BLAST Extreme protocols and not RDP.

For information on more new feature released with Horizon 7 see the following blog

VMware Horizon 7 New Features