Since the launch of our Horizon Subscription Upgrade Program in 2019, many VMware Horizon customers have upgraded to our Horizon Universal Subscription offering, taking advantage of several benefits including:
- Flexible multi-cloud deployment options – deploy and host Horizon anywhere and in multiple clouds at the same time, including on-premises, Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and IBM Cloud. IT can continue to deploy virtual desktops and apps on-premises, leverage the speed and scalability of hyperscaler capacity, or use a combination of both to help their employees quickly get secure access to corporate resources.
- Simplified cross-pod and cross-cloud management – use the cloud-hosted, VMware-managed Horizon Control Plane, which includes multi-cloud SaaS services that allow IT to monitor and manage images, desktops, and apps across Horizon deployments, including both on-premises and in the cloud. For example, IT can use the Universal Broker service to enable a global entitlement layer across a multi-pod or multi-cloud deployment, providing a great user experience to access any desktop from anywhere with a single URL, and reducing TCO by removing the need for a global server load balancer.
- Hybrid and multi-cloud use cases – add new cloud capacity to existing on-premises deployments to enable High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and burst capacity for temporary and seasonal workers without the CapEx requirements for additional data center hardware. Additionally, customers can move desktop and app workloads strategically to the cloud to be closer to cloud-hosted applications to reduce latency and optimize performance and user experience.
Read how Carhartt uses a multi-cloud VDI and app approach by deploying Horizon on-premises and on Azure VMware Solution to provide secure and flexible workspaces for their employees.
Introducing Horizon Standard Plus Subscription and Horizon Enterprise Plus Subscription
Horizon Universal Subscription is a great option for customers that want to add cloud capacity to their on-premises Horizon deployments or who want to put workloads in multiple clouds. However, many customers who have added on-premises capacity to their existing Horizon deployments to meet new scalability requirements for work at home don’t need to add even more public cloud capacity. For these customers we are introducing two new Horizon SaaS editions – Horizon Standard Plus Subscription and Horizon Enterprise Plus Subscription – that bring new SaaS services to simplify and automate management of on-premises and single cloud deployments, while taking data compliance requirements into account. By automating common day-to-day VDI admin tasks and optimizing their existing or future VDI environments, IT can provide greater uptime, performance, and improved user experience.
Let’s see some examples of these new SaaS services.
The Horizon Availability Monitoring service is a cloud-based health check service to see if a Horizon environment is available and responsive. With these health checks, IT can proactively identify issues causing poor performance in desktops and apps. The screenshot below shows several tests that an IT admin can set up from their Horizon Universal Console, including connectivity, authentication, and launching of applications in desktop and app pools.
IT can quickly identify whether these synthetic actions are successful or not and troubleshoot their environment as a result. This lets IT shift their focus to being proactive rather than being reactive to users complaining about poor environment performance. Fewer user complaints means fewer helpdesk tickets. The Horizon Availability Monitoring service is available today.
The Cloud Monitoring Service is another SaaS service in the Horizon Control Plane that provides visibility for infrastructure performance. Cloud Monitoring Service helps IT get ahead of potential environment outages by continuously monitoring critical components of a Horizon environment. As an example, in the screenshot below, an issue has been identified in the Horizon Connection Server where the server’s certificate is not trusted. By gaining this insight, IT can quickly fix the certificate issue and eliminate or reduce the time of an outage.
Cloud Monitoring Service is available in the Horizon Plus Subscription editions, but because the Horizon Plus Subscription editions focus on privacy requirements (more on that below), Cloud Monitoring Service only aggregates health telemetry where no end user usage data is stored outside of the customer’s on-premises or single public cloud vSphere-based Horizon environment. IT can also send insights gathered from Cloud Monitoring Service to their own big data platform, such as Splunk, if they wish to use tools outside of Horizon to further help with troubleshooting.
We also realize that some customers still use manual processes, or PCLM tools not meant for virtual environments, to update their Horizon infrastructure. To that extent, we’re working on even more SaaS services to help IT save significant time in Day 2 management from auto-updating Horizon infrastructure to OS and Blast protocol optimization, straight from the cloud. We’ll share more in this area soon.
The SaaS services available in Horizon Plus Subscription do not send end user usage data to the VMware-managed Horizon Control Plane. This helps reduces customer concerns related to data privacy, data sovereignty and compliance. An Edge Gateway appliance is deployed wherever a customer’s Horizon infrastructure is deployed and is what communicates with the Horizon Control Plane. For more information on VMware product security, privacy, and compliance, visit https://www.vmware.com/products/trust-center.html.
The new Horizon Plus Subscription editions also offer customers choice in deploying their virtual desktop and app workloads either on-premises or on a public, vSphere-based cloud, helping IT use the speed and scalability from hyperscaler deployment. Some customers may want to keep running their desktop and app workloads on-premises, but with Horizon Plus Subscription, they can also choose to run their desktops and apps in the cloud – it’s completely up to the customer and they can still manage either environment with the Horizon Control Plane services.
Through our Horizon Subscription Upgrade Program, the new Horizon Plus Subscription editions provide easy and compelling upgrade paths for customers who have invested in Horizon Standard, Advanced, or Enterprise perpetual licenses, as their virtual desktop and app journey evolves. To learn more, visit http://www.vmware.com/go/horizon to find out which offering is right for you, or contact your VMware sales or partner team.
