As the title says, I am very excited to inform you that VMware Horizon on Oracle Cloud VMware Services Reference Architecture is now live! If you are looking for a joint solution from Oracle and VMware for your virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and published application environment, the wait is over. Before we get into what the solution can do for you, let’s understand what Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is and what it delivers.
What is Oracle Cloud VMware Solution?
The Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS) is a customer-managed, VMware Cloud Verified environment consisting of vSphere, vSAN, NSX-T, and vCenter Server. Customers have full control of their VMware environments, while leveraging the capabilities of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution provides bare metal compute, advanced L2 Network, and storage-rich infrastructure to deliver a full-fidelity VMware service for predictable application performance. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is designed for dynamic, multi-cloud VMware environments, low egress fees, and globally consistent prices deliver predictable costs.
Horizon on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution
Now that we know about OCVS, let’s understand how Horizon and OCVS work together and what value does it deliver together. This solution delivers a full-stack software-defined data center (SDDC), including VMware vCenter, vSphere ESXi, NSX, and vSAN, delivered as a service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). It provides market-leading capabilities of Horizon 8.x and OCVS for a simple, secure, and scalable solution to address use cases such as on-demand hybrid capacity, disaster recovery, and complete security. Let’s look at them one by one. If you are interested in learning more, you can read about the solution architecture on Tech Zone.
Hybrid cloud for your VDI environment
The need for VDI environments has gone up with hybrid work becoming the new reality for most enterprises. Additionally, there is a need to scale up or down, such as compute, storage, or networking, based on your user requirements. Finally, chip shortages are making on-premises investments more expensive for everyone. All these challenges have pushed for a need for a hybrid cloud solution for VDI.
VMware Horizon on Oracle Cloud VMware Service is your answer for this. It provides a true hybrid cloud service for your Horizon VDI workloads and apps, enabling you to extend your on-premises environment to Oracle Cloud. Now, when your VDI environment is supporting more-than-usual users or certain applications see a spike, you have the required infrastructure ready in Oracle Cloud to accommodate your workloads.
You can leverage your vSphere-based software-defined data center (SDDC) investment in your on-premises environment and in Oracle Cloud. You don’t have to learn any new technologies or hire people with new relevant skillsets. You can use your vSphere management tools for the SDDC environment while getting the same level of performance and flexibility for hybrid workloads.
Plus, the central VMware vCenter Admin Console simplifies day two management. Thus, if you want to start, stop, or run any instances, you can do it very easily through a central console. Or if you want to give certain privileges to certain groups or users, you can do that very easily.
Disaster recovery and business continuity
To provide a seamless experience to your VDI users, you need a business continuity and disaster recovery plan in place. Otherwise, when resources go down and you do not have data backup, you can find yourself in a pickle. This is the worst nightmare for any IT admin.
We have addressed this issue for your Horizon environment with our Cloud Pod Architecture. Cloud Pod Architecture or CPA is a feature through which you can link together multiple pods, in Oracle Cloud or on-premises, to provide a single large desktop and application management environment. In other words, you are pooling your resources in one single location and then using them as and when required. This ensures cross-data center administration, global and flexible user-to-desktop mapping, high availability desktops, and disaster recovery.
End-to-end security
Security is a key priority for all our customers, and any oversight can prove painful. We often see news outlets mentioning well-known organizations hit by security breaches, and you want to make sure your company’s name does not get mentioned for any security lapses.
To resolve this, we have developed the VMware Horizon on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution with security as a primary foundation. In Oracle Cloud, this is done by isolating customer tenants with a Zero Trust architecture. Thus, ensuring that you don’t face a nosy neighbor problem, or your data is not exposed to the external world. Plus, using LDAP, only people who should have access to certain environments can access it. No snooping allowed!
Additionally, all the existing hardened VMware security policies, processes, and tools are leveraged in Oracle Cloud and on-premises. This means you get the same level of security for the VDI environment as you would expect otherwise. Thus, giving you complete peace of mind minus any unexpected late-night calls.
Further, you can keep comprehensive visibility through a unified dashboard, i.e., the Horizon Admin Console. This console gives you insights into your VDI environment’s health, as well as help desk services in case you need their assistance. You can access all this through one single console that you are already using on-premises.
Conclusion
In summary, VMware Horizon on OCVS adds more flexibility, control, and agility through a hybrid cloud solution. For customers who are investing in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and want to leverage it for their VDI environment, this is a clear choice. You can choose to scale up or down your Horizon environment with ease while maintaining complete visibility and management.
Reach out to your sales representative if you would like to learn more about this joint solution.
Or to read more, here are some great additional resources:
