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Modernize the Infrastructure Under Omnissa Horizon - Now Fully Certified

Published on 2026-09-08 by Arcfra Team

Last edited on 2026-09-08

Arcfra Virtualization Engine is now certified with Omnissa Horizon. Together with Arcfra Block Storage, which was already certified, the hypervisor and the storage beneath your virtual desktops are now both validated by Omnissa — and both covered by a joint Omnissa and Arcfra support path.

If you already run Horizon, here is what that actually changes for you.

Three key challenges for VDI users

Research published in 2026 found performance variability to be the single most-cited operational pain point in VDI. Nearly a third of organizations cited high ongoing cost, and 61% named budget as the reason they hadn’t changed anything yet.

Then licensing moved. Broadcom has confirmed that VVF for VDI has no entitlement path on vSphere 9, and that vSAN capacity beyond the bundled allowance has to be licensed directly from Broadcom. For a lot of Horizon shops, the under layer infrastructure decision became urgent without anyone choosing to make it.

Keep Horizon. Change what’s under it.

This is the part worth being precise about: nothing about Horizon changes.

Your Connection Servers, your desktop pools, your entitlements, your golden images, your Horizon Console workflows — all of it stays exactly as it is. What changes is the compute, storage and network layer beneath, and now you have a certified choice about what that layer is:

Hypervisor — run on Arcfra AVE, or keep your existing VMware ESXi hosts.
Storage — hyperconverged with Arcfra Block Storage.

Alongside the certification, we’re releasing AECP VDI Standard, a new edition built in response to what Horizon customers kept asking us for: one package and one support path for the whole layer beneath their desktops. It brings both certified layers together — AVE and Arcfra Block Storage on the same servers, licensed by CPU core — carries the highest TCO savings of the AECP editions, and suits a greenfield build or a full replacement of an existing vSphere-and-vSAN estate.

Prefer to keep ESXi for now? AECP VDI Essential puts the same storage layer beneath your existing hosts.

Nothing has to be ripped out on day one. Many customers replace only the storage layer under existing ESXi hosts, then revisit the hypervisor at their next refresh.

What improves

Significant infrastructure software cost savings

Arcfra Block Storage is licensed by CPU core with unlimited capacity, not by terabyte — so growing the desktop estate doesn’t trigger a storage licence true-up. Based on our calculator, cloud infrastructure software cost fell by up to 67% in hyperconverged mode compared with an equivalent Broadcom VMware configuration.

Performance holds under load

Data locality keeps reading I/O on the local host, so boot and login storms don’t saturate the storage network. That covers the unglamorous stuff too — logon times, patching windows, cloning — and sustained throughput under long-running load, not just peak events. In Login VSI testing with a knowledge-worker profile, we recorded an EUX score of 8 with all logon times under 17 seconds.

Failure stops being dramatic

When an SSD fails, Arcfra recovers to more than 80% of original performance within seconds, rather than leaving desktops degraded for minutes.

Zero trust security is built in

On AVE-based deployments, the Arcfra Network Service distributed firewall applies default-deny east-west policy to every desktop. Desktop pools are flat by nature — hundreds of machines on one subnet, where a perimeter firewall never sees the traffic between them. Label-based policy follows desktops as they’re added or migrated, and strict or forensic quarantine contains a compromised desktop in seconds without destroying it or the user data on it.

Where to start

If you’re heading into a Horizon renewal, a hardware refresh, or a capacity expansion that’s about to cost more than you budgeted, that’s the natural moment to look at this.

The most useful first step is a sizing conversation against your real seat count and workload profile, not a generic TCO calculator. We can also run a technical validation on your own hardware, so you compare measured numbers rather than vendor claims.

References

2026 State of VDI Survey (Recast / Nerdio / VMblog, June 2026)

Broadcom KB 439672 and KB 436509

Arcfra VDI Solution

Arcfra Virtualization Engine

Arcfra Block Storage