To face the realities of the modern workplace, IT solutions need to support both security and end-user mobility. VMware Horizon 7 meets these needs, providing end users with access to all of their virtual desktops and applications through a single digital workspace.
Since Horizon 7 is a solution with many infrastructure components, setting it up can prove daunting. To begin a manual setup process, system administrators would need a thorough understanding of how each component of Horizon 7 works and how the solution as a whole is architected. While understanding Horizon 7 and its underlying infrastructure components is essential to supporting the users, system administrators end up spending valuable time that could otherwise be focused on more proactive tasks, like defining, testing and deploying employee use cases.
But the challenges can be addressed. VMware Cloud Foundation streamlines what would be an otherwise manual setup process, allowing customers to benefit from Horizon 7’s secure, centralized desktop and application platform in a fraction of the time it would normally take. With Cloud Foundation, organizations can provide end users with a powerful, unified workspace in a matter of hours.
Cloud Foundation automates the deployment of the extensively tested and validated standardized architecture for the full VMware hybrid cloud stack. This allows for a simplified experience for provisioning consistent infrastructure that is ready for workloads across both core and edge locations of an organization’s hybrid cloud.
With infrastructure automatically deployed, VMware Cloud Foundation can then be used to automatically deploy a complete Horizon virtual desktop environment, with UEM and App Volumes, in line with published Horizon reference architecture. This replaces resource-intensive guesswork with a reliable, validated, end-to-end design.
The time differentials are clear. Even for a team that possessed a detailed understanding of Horizon 7, manual deployment would take about a day. On top of that, organizations can expect to spend even greater amounts of time and IT resources in the planning and prep stages of manual deployment. Cloud Foundation streamlines this entire process, condensing it to only two or three hours. With IP addresses, subnets and DNS entries ready, greenfield deployment of the entire Cloud Foundation infrastructure takes a half-day or less. By leveraging the automated setup provided by Cloud Foundation, a customer can go from nothing to the full stack—including Horizon 7—in less time than it often takes to manually deploy Horizon 7 on top of existing infrastructure.
Another key benefit of Cloud Foundation is automated lifecycle management, which, along with automated deployment, enables on-demand provisioning of isolated infrastructure clusters to enable workload separation. From there, a simplified patching and upgrading process of the software platform provides cloud administrators with the flexibility to choose the timing and scope of the updates.
By providing automated deployment, and prescriptive infrastructure and patch management, Cloud Foundation’s contribution to any organization’s bottom line is truly multifaceted. Cloud Foundation greatly reduces time-to-build, which has the immediate effect of improving ROI and freeing up IT resources. By cutting out the guesswork, Cloud Foundation also minimizes the risk of bad decision-making during deployment that could translate to costly fixes down the road.
Instead of getting stuck in a lengthy setup process, organizations that utilize Cloud Foundation can immediately benefit from Horizon 7. Centralized management of desktops and applications enable quick provisioning of multiple use cases to create a positive employee experience for users on any device working from anywhere. Because storage is concentrated in the data center and not at each endpoint, Horizon 7 provides a level of security that’s critical to industries with highly sensitive data, such as healthcare and banking. Customers can also supercharge their data centers with NVIDIA GPUs, providing better performance and enabling 3D workloads across the organization without having to equip every endpoint.
Taken together, Horizon 7 empowers the end user to work securely from any device, anywhere. It’s that kind of flexibility that gives customers a competitive edge and the ability to innovate, regardless of where, how, and in which industries they do business. While the risk and up-front investment of IT resources can act as initial barriers to widespread adoption, VMware Cloud Foundation removes those barriers and allows more organizations to benefit from Horizon 7, faster than ever before.
Check out our series VMware Cloud Foundation + Horizon on YouTube:
Part 1: Deploying a Horizon Workload Domain
Part 2: Creating a Horizon Desktop Pool
