Customers increasingly deploy desktop and app virtualization with VMware Horizon to improve security, deliver greater enterprise mobility and streamline management. And they most often deploy the market-leading virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology on top of the market-leading software-defined data center (SDDC) stack—VMware vSphere, VMware vSAN and VMware NSX for compute, storage and network virtualization.
This is great for customers, because with VDI, we provide the entire software stack, from storage to monitoring. That allows us to tightly integrate all components to simplify management and eliminate complexity. But while we’ve had integration between all the components, customers still had to pull all the pieces together.
Now, we’ve taken it a step further. VMware Cloud Foundation includes SDDC Manager, which automates the entire system lifecycle (from initial bring-up, to configuration and provisioning, to upgrades and patching), and simplifies day-to-day management and operations of the core SDDC stack.
To further simplify management, we’ve extended that integration to Horizon, as well. SDDC Manager is now integrated with Horizon 7 so you can literally configure and deploy Horizon 7 at the push of a button.
Why should you deploy Horizon 7 with Cloud Foundation? Let’s dig in.
Push-Button, Simple Management
With Cloud Foundation for Horizon 7, you get a complete solution for VDI deployments at scale. You can simplify planning and design with a standardized and tested solution, fully optimized for VDI workloads.
Cloud Foundation also reduces complexity with automated deployments, configuration and provisioning.
On average, Cloud Foundation customers experience 6–8 times faster time to deployment.
And since this is all based on hyper-converged infrastructure, Cloud Foundation for desktop environments can accommodate thousands of desktops with elastically scalable infrastructure. Starting with as few as eight nodes, you can linearly scale capacity and performance one node at a time as needed.
End-to-End Security
The combination of Cloud Foundation and Horizon 7 means you can eliminate threats and malware from the endpoint to the data center. You can reduce data leakage from lost or stolen devices, and ensure that every desktop or app is running from a pristine, trusted image in the data center. You can also enforce policy-driven access to apps and desktops across corporate- and employee-owned devices, complete with virtual machine (VM) data encryption.
With Cloud Foundation, you get additional security protection through NSX. Security threats that do get through can be quarantined by NSX network micro-segmentation. This “shrink-wrapped security” method uses distributed, virtual firewalling to police traffic to and from each VM, eliminating unauthorized access between desktops and adjacent workloads.
Best-of-Breed VDI Stack
With Horizon and Cloud Foundation, VMware offers you all the software components that you need for a best-of-breed VDI stack. You also get tight integration between components.
Our Just-in-Time Management Platform (JMP) technologies are an example of this. We leverage VMware Instant Clone Technology from the hypervisor to quickly create on-demand desktops. Kernel-level integration with vSAN is another example of how our hyperconverged technology can take advantage of performance gains through deep integration.
Bottom line, you get risk-free deployments with the fastest time to value. On the hardware side, you have the freedom to “build” your ideal solution with qualified hardware from Dell EMC, Cisco, Fujitsu, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Lenovo and Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT), or “buy” fully integrated systems delivered through Dell EMC VxRack SDDC, HDS UCP RS, Fujitsu Primeflex and QCT QxStack.
For more information about Cloud Foundation for Horizon 7, visit the new VMware Cloud Foundation for Horizon page.
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