The continuing escalation of COVID-19 cases worldwide has forced millions of employees to work from home, which in turn has made it necessary for businesses to provide secure, remote access to business-critical applications as part of their continuity plan. Gabe Knuth from VMware’s End-User Computing product marketing team discusses how Horizon Cloud on IBM Cloud enables businesses to securely and rapidly deploy virtual desktop and application workloads in IBM Cloud without the need for special skill sets or large upfront investments during uncertain times.
Traditionally, deploying a desktop virtualization environment is a time-consuming process that requires special skill sets and a large upfront capital expense. The current global health situation has resulted in millions of employees staying home, and increased the need to provide secure, remote access to business-critical applications as part of a business continuity plan. Because of the urgency of the situation, there’s little time to acquire hardware and expertise to accomplish this on-premises. Fortunately, customers can turn to the cloud.
VMware and IBM have been uniquely positioned with the ability to securely and rapidly deploy virtual desktop and application workloads in IBM Cloud for over four years. With nearly 2,000 customers and 35+ datacenters, IBM is one of VMware’s leading cloud partners.
Today, I wanted to take a quick look at how Horizon Cloud on IBM Cloud can help you achieve your business continuity goals.
Unlike on-premises deployments where the customer is responsible for the entire environment, from the servers to the desktop virtualization infrastructure to the desktops and apps themselves, Horizon Cloud on IBM Cloud removes the need for you acquire and deploy the underlying infrastructure, meaning you can spin up and scale your desktop virtualization environment easily. Plus, you can feel confident knowing that VMware and IBM are behind the scenes, delivering enterprise-grade security, production-level support, and 99.9% uptime.
This allows organizations to take advantage of a true DaaS service that includes persistent and non-persistent VDI desktops as well as session-hosted desktops and applications. Through the use of the Horizon Cloud Control Plane, customers can easily deploy and manage their environments with enterprise-class capabilities like Instant Clones and Dynamic Environment Manager. Users can also benefit from Workspace ONE Access, which means they can have a consistent experience no matter which corporate device or applications they’re using.
These powerful capabilities mean that admins can quickly add capacity to accommodate a large number of remote workers with a varying level of needs (task workers, GPU workloads, power users, developers, etc.) in a short period of time. Where it might take hundreds of thousands of dollars and several months to deploy a traditional desktop virtualization environment (even with the external pressures of today), Horizon Cloud on IBM Cloud can get users up and running–and productive–in a as little as a week.
Next Steps
Horizon Cloud on IBM Cloud is one of the reasons that IDC named VMware a leader in its 2019-2020 IDC MarketScape for Virtual Client Computing Vendor Assessment.
It’s worth noting that if you’d prefer to use Horizon 7 on IBM Cloud to create a fully customized environment, you can do that, too. You can also use Horizon 7 on IBM Cloud as burst capacity to supplement your on-premises Horizon 7 environment, and if you need help, IBM services can help you get up and running quickly. For more information, see the reference architecture that IBM released at VMworld 2019.
If you’d like to learn more about Horizon Cloud on IBM Cloud and the Horizon Universal License, which entitles customers to run desktop virtualization workloads in any VMware Horizon environment, it’s easy to get started:
• Visit the VMware Horizon on IBM Cloud page at IBM.com
• Visit Horizon Cloud on IBM Cloud product page at VMware.com
• Get your feet wet with the Horizon Cloud on IBM Cloud Hands-on Lab
• Read more about the Horizon Universal License
• Check out the VMTN forums
• Read the product documentation
• Quick Start Guide for Horizon Cloud on Hosted Infrastructure (IBM Cloud)
What’s Next?
Each day over the next few weeks, we will be rolling out a series of posts and resources around business continuity. We also hosted a business continuity webinar, Pandemic Preparedness and Response: How to Quickly Set Up a Remote Workforce for Success, that you can watch on-demand.
Original blog posted here
