By Stephane Asselin, Senior Architect, End-User-Computing Technical Enablement, VMware
Customers are using VMware Horizon Air with great success to drive down the total cost of ownership (TCO) for desktops by providing their end users with a virtual desktop. A recent addition to Horizon Air is the inclusion of hosted applications, which means that users through their Horizon Air Web portals can now choose a virtual desktop or a published application. Also, with the VMware acquisition of Immidio, IT administrators can now use VMware User Environment Manager (formerly called Flex+) to deliver persistence to a nonpersistent desktop environment.
What UEM Adds to Horizon Air
Using a smartphone, tablet, Mac, or PC, a user logs in once to Horizon Air, and then can use the desktops and applications there without additional logins to VPN or other security mechanisms. In the screenshot that follows, you can see that the end user who is logged in to the Horizon Air Desktop Portal has access to three hosted applications and one virtual desktop.
With VMware UEM, end users can retain their personal configurations and settings across physical, virtual, and cloud-based environments, including Horizon Air. This capability also extends to hosted or published application solutions such as Horizon Air hosted applications and Citrix XenApp published applications.
The IT administrator stores the user’s Windows and application configurations and settings outside of the user session. This enables the settings to follow the end user wherever they go. If the end user logs in to a virtual desktop, the application configuration settings will be there when the application launches. If the user connects to a Horizon Air hosted application, the same settings also follow them, providing the consistent user experience that everyone wants.
Higher-Education Solution
VMware recently deployed Horizon Air with User Environment Manager for an institute of higher education. The main goal was to reduce the cost of a student desktop and applications, while retaining the student-customized environment. In the higher-education sector, students are tech savvy and they want to be able to log in from any device at any time while keeping the same look and feel for their applications. Students customize their application toolbars, change the personalized skins of their applications, add plug-ins, and so on. If a student had to reconfigure all of these settings every time they opened an application, they would stop using the solution.
The institute of higher education had already deployed Horizon Air using the virtual desktop functionality. Next, we added Horizon Air hosted applications to their environment and, then, within an hour, we added the VMware User Environment Manager solution, with everything configured to work together.
The result? The end users now have persistent application settings across their Horizon Air desktops, their Horizon Air hosted applications, and their physical desktops, all with the built-in functionality of User Environment Manager. Watch the video Horizon Air with UEM for a quick look at the consistent user experience across different login types.
Next Step for Horizon Air
VMware is looking at expanding the applicable use cases of Horizon Air and UEM with more End-User-Computing solutions. Predictable cost of a desktop, always on, and always reachable—these are qualities you find in Horizon Air. Keep checking the Horizon Air website often—a lot more announcements are coming in the future.
Every IT administrator wants the same thing—to manage only one configuration setting per application per user and not worry about the past jumble of user settings, which were considered exceptions. (All IT administrators want to avoid configuration sprawl!) With VMware User Environment Manager, personalized settings become a manageable norm.
For more information about VMware User Environment Manager, we encourage you to watch the training videos on our YouTube End-User-Computing Channel.
