Horizon 7.11 Deployment – Part 1: Use-case, goal and why Horizon?

Feb 1, 2020
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Hi readers,

This post is the first part of a VMware Horizon 7.11 Deployment series. In this first part, we will look into what Horizon is, what it is used for and why you should use it.

As VMware puts it out, which is a great explanation of what Horizon 8 is for; VMware Horizon 7: “simplifies the management and delivery of virtual desktops and apps on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid or multi-cloud configuration through a single platform to end-users. By leveraging complete workspace environment management and optimized for the software-defined data center, Horizon 7 helps IT control, manage, and protect all of the Windows resources end users want, at the speed they expect, with the efficiency business demands.“

The main use case is for VDI. What is VDI? VDI is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. This means that, for example, employees in your company can connect to a Windows virtual machine which has their corporate applications on it from anywhere where there is an internet connection. From your laptop, tablet, computer, smartphone, Mac, thin client devices and more. This also works with just applications. The two above is just a bit of what VMware Horizon 7 offers, though this is one of the most popular use-cases.

Why would you choose VMware Horizon 7? If you already a vSphere Stack, it integrates very well into this. For example, it leverages the capabilities of VMware vCenter server to easily clone Windows desktops VMs from a template, on an on-demand basis for your employees. After this, further restrictions such as policies can be applied.

Here is another example of why to use Horizon 7:

  • For example, a user starts writing a report on the branch office PC, and suddenly the power goes out in their building. The user can pick up where they left off at home on their MacBook or iPad because their virtual desktop resides in the data center.

  • In fact, if a user does not happen to have a device of their own at the moment, they can borrow one and use the Horizon 7 HTML Access web client. The web client does not require installing any software on the client device.

  • VMs can reside on high-availability clusters of VMware vSphere servers.

Here is an amazing VMware Tech Zone blog post, which describes it very well as well. Here is a nice picture of Horizon 7 features:

Features of VMware Horizon 7

As you can see, this is many more features compared to most other VDI applications.

In the next part, we will be deploying the requirements for VMware Horizon 7.

I hope that this was useful and see you in the next post.