VMware Blast Extreme

What is Blast Extreme?

Blast Extreme is a proprietary display  protocol create by VMware and introduced with the Horizon 7 release. It is an evolution of a protocol VMware introduced when they delivered HTML Access for Horizon, this protocol was simply just called Blast. Blast started as a TCP-based protocol leveraging JPG/PNG-based codec to deliver a great user experience to a browser. Now, with Blast Extreme leveraging the H.264 codec, end-user devices can offload the protocol decode to hardware, rather than the CPU.

Blast Extreme brings Blast into feature parity with PCoIP. Similarly to PCoIP, Blast Extreme can be managed via Active Directory GPO where you can set frame rate levels, disable audio and more. The protocol requires the Horizon client and is supported with the latest 4.0 clients for all supported operating systems (OS).

On the server side, when combined with an NVIDIA GRID vGPU, the protocol encoding can be offloaded to the server’s GPU. This provides both performance gains and saves CPU utilization.

Blast Extreme Policies

Blast Extreme Policies – A deep-dive on the Blast Extreme policies can be found here. (Work in progress)