The 2506 release of Omnissa Horizon 8 marks a major expansion for VDI deployment flexibility: Nutanix AHV is now a supported hypervisor in Limited Availability (LA). This milestone gives Horizon customers a new way to build scalable, high-performance desktop environments — whether on-prem, in hybrid infrastructure or in public cloud via Nutanix NC2.

What’s available now in Limited Availability

Omnissa’s Limited Availability support for Horizon on Nutanix AHV includes:

  • Prism Central Integration
    Automate power management, provisioning and lifecycle workflows from a unified interface.
  • Unified Access Gateway (UAG) on AHV
    Enable secure, reliable remote access for virtual desktops and apps without requiring separate hypervisors.
  • Simplified Pool Model
    Use AHV’s Redirect-on-Write cloning to create fast, space-efficient desktops — persistent or non-persistent.
  • Image Management Enhancements
    Customize images with built-in tools and reusable compute profiles for consistent deployments.
  • Hybrid Deployments with Nutanix NC2
    Manage desktop workloads across public clouds like Azure, AWS and Google Cloud — all from your Horizon console.
  • Additional 2506 Enhancements
    • Power management policies
    • vGPU support (NVIDIA)
    • App Volumes and DEM integration
    • FIPS mode
    • Cloud Pod Architecture

These features are enabled through joint collaboration between Omnissa and Nutanix to ensure real-world readiness for enterprise VDI environments.

Looking ahead: General Availability by late 2025

Omnissa has shared a preliminary roadmap targeting General Availability later this year. On the horizon are several key enhancements: fully managed NVIDIA GPU support, automated RDSH farms with published apps (including Apps on Demand), deeper image customization tools, integration with Workspace ONE Access for unified identity, Horizon Cloud Services for monitoring, help desk, and telemetry, as well as expanded support for Universal Broker.

Note: Roadmap timelines and feature scope are subject to change as testing continues.

How Tech Orchard supports your Horizon 8 on AHV journey

As a Platinum Omnissa Partner and your trusted EUC experts, we’re here to help you evaluate, plan and implement Horizon 8 on AHV by aligning performance, cost and scalability with your business goals. We’ll help you validate Limited Availability readiness within your current infrastructure and GPU workloads, design a Horizon 8 architecture on Nutanix AHV that includes App Volumes, DEM, and UAG, and plan migrations from legacy VDI to hybrid operations on Nutanix NC2. We also work directly with Omnissa to enable Limited Availability features and ensure your implementation aligns with their latest best practices.

Whether you’re expanding desktop services to edge locations, optimizing infrastructure costs or exploring hybrid-cloud flexibility, this release opens up a powerful new path for achieving critical digital workspace goals.

Ready to evaluate Horizon 8 on Nutanix AHV? Let’s schedule a short scoping call to align on goals, licensing, and next steps. Contact Alec Justice at alec@techorchard.com or schedule a call now.