With contributions and video production by Josh Spencer, EUC Technical Marketing Architect, VMware
We are excited to announce a new video series on Horizon Cloud Service on Microsoft Azure. These four videos provide you with exactly what you need to know about setup, deployment, and use of this new VMware offering.
First Video: Overview of Horizon Cloud and Microsoft Azure Prerequisites
The first video of the series is an overview of how Horizon Cloud works on Microsoft Azure, and the prerequisites for deploying a Horizon Cloud Node.
You bring your own Microsoft Azure IaaS capacity, resulting in quick service for your end users. The VMware Horizon Cloud control plane provides comprehensive management of desktops and applications, and users.
This video provides a close-up view of the steps to configure the Azure prerequisites, in preparation for a Horizon Cloud deployment. The video highlights Active Directory options, VNet peering, DNS configuration, and more.
Second Video: Deploying a Horizon Cloud Node and Binding it to an Existing AD Domain
The second video provides the steps for deploying a Horizon Cloud Node, and binding it to an existing Active Directory domain. You grant the Horizon Cloud control plane access to create and manage resources in Azure.
After you log in to the Horizon Cloud control plane, you add cloud capacity, which triggers the easy-to-use deployment wizard.
Horizon Cloud automatically builds and configures VMware Unified Access Gateway appliances for remote access, creates the required subnet blocks, and deploys the Node. The completion of the bind operation enables AD authentication from Horizon Cloud, and you are ready to create farms for end-user access.
See it in action in this video:
Third Video: Creating Images and Deploying RD Session Host Farms
The third video shows how to import a VM template from the Azure Marketplace, use Horizon Cloud to automatically convert VMs to images, and deploy farms.
Horizon Cloud joins the VM to the domain, enables the RDS role, installs the Horizon Agents, and performs a bootstrap process to pair the guest with your Horizon Cloud Node. Horizon Cloud automates this process for VMs imported from the Azure Marketplace, or you can perform these steps manually on existing VMs. The supported options are displayed in the menus, and Horizon Cloud includes advanced features for customization. After the image is published, you can create farms. The New Farm wizard makes setup easy; just follow the prompts. After a farm is completed, it dynamically creates the Windows hosts in Azure.
Horizon Cloud provides power management that automatically powers on, powers off, and deallocates hosts as needed. If you optimize for performance, Horizon Cloud keeps more hosts powered on than necessary for the current workload. As incoming users log in, hosts are powered on in advance, up to the threshold. Alternatively, if you optimize for power, Horizon Cloud more aggressively deallocates unused hosts. This leaves fewer resources for incoming users, but saves on infrastructure costs.
Horizon Cloud can auto-discover applications stored on the farm, or you can manually select applications to be published, and assign them to users or groups yourself.
Fourth Video: Horizon Cloud Monitoring and Analytics
The video series concludes with a fourth video, which provides demonstrations of Horizon Cloud Monitoring, sample reports, and more.
Be sure to watch these four new videos for technical details about Horizon Cloud Service on Microsoft Azure.
You can find more information at the Horizon Cloud Service on Microsoft Azure documentation page:
