1. VMware Horizon – Install and Configure – Introduction
This article is the first article of a series of articles which guide you How to install and configure VMware’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution, VMware Horizon (Formerly known as VMware Horizon View).
In this post, we also describe how VMware Horizon is different from the traditional Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions. Let’s understand VDI by understanding its major characteristics and then will continue further with how VMware Horizon is different from other VDI solutions.
What is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)?
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a technology that allows users to host a desktop operating system (OS) on servers as well as access VM-based desktops by users remotely from different devices and locations. VDI can be deployed in a private (on-premises Data Centers) or public cloud (Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS)) and considered as a type of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) or DaaS (Desktop as a Service).
In Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, we can make use of various connection brokers aka connection servers which helps us to automate the connections from user PC’s to virtual desktops, connection servers act as a helping hand for organizations running with help desk user environments where every user needs the access to the same desktops. Various TCP/IP-based remote protocols like Remote Desktop Protocol, Virtual Network Computing (VNC) which uses a remote frame buffer protocol can be used to connect a remote client to Virtual Desktops.
Why and When can VDI be used?
VDI can be used as an alternative to traditional infrastructure (where real physical desktops are used). There are some use cases for which virtual desktop infrastructure is especially handy,
- Users require access to their desktops during business trips from different locations and devices
- A company wants employees to work remotely from home
- A company doesn’t want to buy expensive new desktops or workstations and would prefer to buy only new servers and companies can buy less powerful endpoints and thin clients to connect to VDI as the actual computing takes place at the endpoint is very less
- A company wishes to avoid the issues associated with using different hardware for physical desktops, for example, finding or installing different drivers
- A company wishes to simplify its IT infrastructure by eliminating the need to integrate apps within user endpoints. So users can bring their own endpoint devices to the workplace and quickly access a VDI Desktop with no additional configuration to their enterprise applications
VMware Horizon
VMware Horizon is a product offering from VMware to create a virtual desktop infrastructure (VD) and uses the VMware vSphere (Vmware’s Data Center Virtualization Solution) for hosting virtual desktops. It is designed in such a way it integrates with the other VMware products.
Since VMware Horizon is based on VMware vSphere and uses the vSphere environment for hosting virtual desktops. With VMware Horizon all the guest operating systems supported by VMware ESXi can be used as desktops, depending on the requirements within the organization we can go ahead and create desktops for Windows, RedHat, Ubuntu, etc. VMware vCenter Server is used to manage the resources and the Virtual Desktops, we can also leverage various features and functionalities like such as High Availability, Distributed Resource Scheduler, vMotion, snapshots and others are available. The VMware Horizon VDI solution provides greater flexibility and security than terminal services because user data is stored on virtualized servers that can be managed, updated, and backed up centrally.
Horizon works differently from terminal servers such as VNC or Windows Terminal Services (previously known as Remote Desktop Services). When using terminal services, users can access the server and use applications in their sessions according to permissions specified by the administrator(s). One physical server or virtual machine is shared by multiple users, and access to local resources may be restricted for them. Some software may not work properly with remote desktop services.
VMware Horizon is a highly customizable VMware solution for Virtual Desktop infrastructure and is a complete packaged solution that provides desktop management, pool management, application virtualization, storage management, application entitlement.
To find out more about VMware Horizon
