Rapidly scale Horizon desktops and applications with an elastic cloud platform
Enterprises are embracing hybrid cloud in a big way. Studies have shown that at least 79.9%* of organizations have a hybrid cloud strategy today. The desire for a hybrid cloud is fueled by enterprises that want the benefits and flexibility offered by the cloud, but are reluctant to give up their on-premises infrastructure. As applications move toward hybrid cloud deployments, so too should virtual desktops and application delivery. Wouldn’t it be great to extend your on-premises virtual desktop and application platform to the cloud?
That is why I am excited to share the news that we will be previewing the VMware Horizon premier platform for virtual desktops and applications on VMware Cloud on AWS.
What’s the benefit of running Horizon on VMware Cloud on AWS?
Horizon is a secure and enterprise-ready platform for virtual desktops and applications deployed and managed on-premises today. With the Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA) capability, it can scale across multiple pods and sites, allowing a large-scale federated management in on-premises data centers or private clouds. Stretching a CPA across on-premises data centers and VMware Cloud on AWS instances enables Horizon to easily run on a hybrid cloud environment. By having the VMware Cloud platform as a backend to Horizon, customers can now outsource the management of the SDDC infrastructure to VMware. Architecturally, the Horizon platform is the same on-premises and in VMware’s Cloud, so the deployment and management experience stays consistent across the entire environment. Best of all, customers do not have to purchase new hardware, and instead have the option of pay-as-you-go by leveraging VMware Cloud’s hourly billing.
How will customers be using Horizon on VMware Cloud on AWS?
Data center expansion – This is for customers who have existing on-premises Horizon infrastructure and need to expand capacity, but don’t wish to procure additional hardware. Extending Horizon to VMware Cloud on AWS will allow these customers to leverage cloud capacity, while still being able to manage their on-premises and VMware Cloud deployments in a single federated space. The cloud platform can also be utilized to provide temporary capacity for contractors and seasonal workers.
Application locality – Many customers want to move latency sensitive applications to AWS and need desktops and RDS hosts to be co-located with their applications. They may also have other applications that are still on-premises. Extending Horizon to VMware Cloud on AWS allows end users to connect to the nearest desktop or RDS hosts to the application, regardless of whether this application is on-premises or on VMware Cloud on AWS.
Disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity – Every customer wants DR for their primary on-premises infrastructure, but the cost of building out an on-premises DR site can be prohibitively expensive. With VMware Cloud on AWS, customers only pay for the DR infrastructure they use during the times when their primary infrastructure is down, plus a small “pilot light” during normal operations if they desire a quick Recovery Time Objective (RTO) during a disaster event. A single unified Horizon architecture across the primary site and the DR site on VMware Cloud on AWS makes the failover process very simple. In addition, Horizon CPA can also be deployed across two or more VMware Cloud instances, thus providing high availability across multiple cloud nodes.
Is Horizon on VMware Cloud on AWS Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS)?
Even though Horizon on VMware Cloud on AWS is leveraging cloud infrastructure, this is not a pure-play DaaS solution. Rather, this preview offers customers the ability to deploy Horizon as a software stack on VMware Cloud on AWS. While the VMware Cloud service is fully managed by VMware, customers must still deploy and manage their own Horizon infrastructure (i.e. connection brokers and other Horizon server components). The image below lays out the difference between the various deployment models that customers can take advantage of.
Is the preview something I can get my hands on?
The short answer is, not today. But stay tuned, there is definitely more to come.
*Source: IDC White Paper, sponsored by Dell EMC, The Power of Hybrid Cloud, May 2017
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