Check Out This Great “The Story of VMware Blast” Blog!

The ultimate goal in user interface (UI) remoting is to make the remoted end-user experience as close as possible to local application execution. This is a challenging goal that becomes increasingly more feasible as connection latency (RTT) drops under 50 milliseconds. In addition, there is still much room for innovation on how to efficiently determine changed pixels on a server, encode, transport, present those pixels on the user device and obtain user input in response.

VMware Blast is the VMware UI remoting technology in VMware Horizon. Blast uses standardized encoding schemes, including JPG/PNG and H.264 for pixel encoding, and Opus for audio. Unlike proprietary encoding schemes, these standard formats are supported natively, hence efficiently, in browsers and mobile devices.

Blast-JPG/PNG shipped in the Fall of 2013 in support of browser clients and in early 2015 in support of Linux virtual machines. Blast-H.264 shipped in March 2016 with Horizon 7, as Blast Extreme, with feature and performance parity with PCoIP. Much was written about Blast Extreme since. Here, we provide background and more in-depth technical details.

Check out the rest of this blog article here!