By Neena K. Razdan, Senior Member of the Technical Staff, Horizon Manager Quality Engineering, End-User Computing, VMware; and Dalbir Sehmbi, Senior Member of the Technical Staff, Horizon View Quality Engineering, End-User Computing, VMware
One of the new capabilities VMware offers in Horizon Workspace 1.0, released in March 2013, is integration with VMware Horizon View. Users in the Horizon Workspace environment can access Horizon View desktops via single sign-on. With this integration, users can access their virtual desktops on any device through HTML5 browsers or Horizon View Clients.
VMware Horizon Workspace provides secure access to applications and data on any mobile device or computer, simplifying the end-user experience while reducing management costs. VMware Horizon View delivers rich, personalized virtual desktops as a managed service from a virtualization platform built to deliver the entire desktop, including the operating system, applications, and data.
This figure shows the authentication flow sequence, from user login to the launch of a Horizon View desktop, after Horizon View and Horizon Workspace are integrated.
To integrate Horizon View and Horizon Workspace, you configure Horizon View to delegate responsibility for authentication to a SAML 2.0 identity provider. You set up Horizon Workspace to act as the SAML 2.0 identity provider, while Horizon View acts as a service provider. When authentication delegation is enabled and a user is authenticated via SAML 2.0, the entire authentication process is delegated to Horizon Workspace. Information about the Horizon View environment is also made available to Horizon Workspace. To benefit from this integration, you must install Horizon View 5.2, Horizon Workspace 1.0, and Horizon View Client 1.6 or later.
To learn more, see the white paper Integrating VMware Horizon Workspace and VMware Horizon View. This technical paper provides detailed information about how Horizon View integrates with Horizon Workspace. The paper describes the mechanism that allows Horizon View to accept sessions that are already authenticated by Horizon Workspace via a secure channel between Horizon Workspace and Horizon View. Details about other features, such as ThinApp, Data, and HTML Access, are beyond the scope of the paper.
You can watch two quick overviews of this topic on YouTube.com:
