By Tristan Todd, Architect, End-User Computing, VMware
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Tony Paikeday, Product Marketing, End-User Computing, VMware
VMware Horizon 6 brings innovation to the desktop platform and extends app delivery across any device. Customers and partners agree that VMware is delivering the most comprehensive mobile desktop solution. If you are looking for excellent user experience, ease of management, and a reasonable cost model, there simply is not a better portfolio of products in the industry today.
This portfolio is built on the VMware software defined data center (SDDC), delivering an optimized infrastructure for workspace services. The main component of SDDC is VMware NSX. We want to describe how the confluence of end-user-computing capabilities (such as Horizon 6 with App Volumes and VMware User Environment Manager) combines with NSX to change how IT approaches desktop and app delivery with unprecedented simplicity, agility, and security.
We will share with you a new deep-dive video that walks through this unified platform. But first let us look at this solution from the perspective of our stakeholders, and the describe the benefits they derive:
- End users – The unified platform deploys and configures the corporate hosted desktop to the users’ liking. Any changes that users make are retained, even though they might access a different “throwaway” desktop every day. As end users, they get access to the applications and services that they need and are not exposed to networks that are unnecessary for their roles. Spectacular user-experience comes from our world-class hypervisor technologies, via efficient display protocols, delivered to just about any endpoint device.
- Administrators – Administrators benefit from a set of products that are tightly integrated, easy to deploy, and intuitively managed. Desktop and application life cycle management is centralized and simple with features such as View Composer linked-clone pools. Scalability is predictable; good performance is assured as the environment grows larger.
- Businesses – For businesses, there are no barriers to quickly onboarding new use cases. Newly acquired applications can be packaged and delivered as App Volumes containers, and identity-based network policies can be put in place with the NSX distributed firewall. This means that as the business organization quickly changes, there is little risk of not passing the next security audit.
In the preceding figure, the combination of View in Horizon 6, App Volumes, VMware User Environment Manager, and NSX provides an array of excellent capabilities, as outlined in the following table:
| Product | Role or Capability | Technical Benefit | Business Benefit |
| View in Horizon 6 | Delivers virtual or hosted desktops and applications through a single platform |
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| App Volumes | Provides real-time application delivery with life cycle management |
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| VMware User Environment Manager | Delivers a consistent and dynamic application and desktop experience across any device, location, or operating system |
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| NSX | Brings security inside the data center with automated fine-grained policies tied to the virtual machines, while its network virtualization capabilities let you create entire networks in software, without touching the underlying physical infrastructure |
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The integration of these four VMware technologies offers amazing capabilities and benefits to users, administrators, and business leaders. If you are now ready to go deeper, check out the new in-depth video overview: Deep-dive: Securing Desktop Virtualization with NSX and Horizon. Let us know what you think!
