Horizon 8 Reviews

Use as a test center for medical students was the primary purpose of the launch. The number of users seen included was about two hundred. The model was kiosk-mode. Each time, after the end of the virtual machine exam, it was presented. It had to change on the user.

Organizing and integrating is perhaps the most important feature.

Reducing maintenance costs as well as reducing end-time service to end users can be another feature.

Infrastructure equipment and Zero Client. It also has great flexibility in infrastructure changes, both in software and in hardware. You can increase the resources needed by the user or software needed in a few seconds.

Managing all operating systems in a single environment helped a lot in organizing and integrating it. Also, there is no operating system on the user-side hardware.

There is no worry that it will crash and you will be able to recover it in seconds.

Using this solution in medium to large organizations can be justified. Since virtualization is widespread in many organizations today, launching this solution may not require much infrastructure change.

Offices that do not require much processing are a good place to use this solution.

Places such as universities are not suitable for this solution.

The initial startup costs for this solution are relatively high.

Because it's more focused on integration, it's much more flexible and easier to manage.

This solution is Very Scalable

The technical support for this solution is very satisfying.

We tried solutions from Parallels, but it didn't seem right for the organization.

Most organizations have gone to virtualization and VMware clustering. Most of the work is already done.

Our in-house team handled the deployment.

We have seen ROI between two and three years.

The initial startup costs for this solution are relatively high.

Licensing and hardware outsourcing is expensive, but can be cost-effective in the three to five-year range.

Features like LinkedClone, Desktop Pool with many delivery options and one single pane of glass to rule all desktop environments can simplify VDI management and reduce infrastructure costs.

In my low use-case, Horizon VDI is showing the agility to provide employees using many devices such as a tablet, PC and Mac, with portability but still stay within an active directory environment, with data and software which are in a "usable secure place".

I think that providing the solution for Linux desktops could be a real improvement as this would deliver desktops for operations and administrative operators without huge licensing costs (Desktops that have LibreOffice, Firefox and Linux client for client-server application). Another enhancement for this product could be a more simplified active directory GPO management through the Horizon Administrator console.

I've been using this solution for one year, but only for demo purposes. We use this solution to try to demonstrate its real value.

During the deployment take care with deploying the primary domain controller and the underlying vSphere environment.The VMs must be correctly resolved, NTP must be correctly reached and synchronized to, and PDC must be correctly configured. No issues will be encountered if you watch out for these simple constraints.

The product is mature, and stability is never compromised. In some cases, stability is gained by the underlying infrastructure stability. For this reason, pay attention to infrastructure metrics like storage IOPS and CPU utilization. In my case, the underlying infrastructure is covering up many possible issues.

I haven't scaled out my infrastructure, because my environment didn't reach the limit.

I haven't used it in this environment.

I haven't used it in this environment.

Yes, I used Microsoft Terminal server (from Windows Server 2003 and 2008). I suggest deploying this solution to a few remote desktops, but still keep a VDI solution because it is lacking in many features like management, mobility and multimedia experience. For this reason, I switched to Horizon.

Deployment is not very easy, because there are many implications with the underlying infrastructure (which must be used only as a VDI infrastructure) and Active Directory GPO, which cannot be directly handled by View Administrator.

I deployed this solution in house and alone.

Choosing VDI to save hardware costs is not the goal of Horizon, because the infrastructure and licensing break-even point can only be reached after the 1000^th VDI. ROI must be measured in controlling the manpower costs. For this reason, often it is difficult to show the real advantage of the Horizon solution. In my case, because I'm using it for demo purposes I can't give more details about this.

Licensing costs are important and physical infrastructure could not be shared between classic server virtual datacenter and a Horizon environment. In my case the use of NFR costs (only for demo purpose) are near zero, (the infrastructure is made by using recycled hardware).

Yes, we also looked at Windows Terminal Server.

In my opinion, this product should be the first environment that an enterprise company must consider. This product is a potential first player providing a top enterprise solution to deliver VDI in large and very large environments. For this reason, my rating of is 10/10 when considering a solution for enterprise environment and 8/10 in a mid-size deployment.

Pay attention to how many virtual desktops you should deliver and what is the real desktop utilization.A few desktops and too much customizations could cause an unjustified costs for three years.

Within my company, there are 50 employees using this solution.

Personally, I prefer Citrix, because you can do a lot of things with Citrix. Still, VMware has a lot of experience in virtualization — they are the pioneers in virtualization. They are both great solutions.

This solution is both stable and it's also very secure, too.

It requires some experience to deploy it, but overall, It's not that difficult.

This solution is expensive. A lot of companies in Mexico find that the price is too high.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give VMware Horizon View a rating of ten.

Horizon actually has been working well in the current pandemic situation. Originally, we had clients deployed in our infrastructure. Now, once working from home or remote working has been imposed, we deployed a Unified Gateway. It's simply one more component of Horizon, and it allows us to give access over the public IP so that those people at home get the same environment itself as they work from their home without causing any user experience problems. There were no additional licenses required for that job either, which was nice.

I would love to see so they can actually allow the use of Linux, from a hosting environment as well as from a VDI client environment. If I can actually host Linux instances as VDIs with the same features as what I get on Windows and have all the key components, like the Composer, database, or the connection services, that would be ideal. Often, ransomware and attacks usually target Windows, therefore, if I'm on Linux, at least I'll have some level of comfort or a buffer against danger.

VMware Horizon was deployed around one and a half years ago in my infrastructure.

We do not have any problems with the stability part of it. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's not buggy and it doesn't have any glitches. It's reliable.

VMware is a hyper-converged infrastructure model. Therefore, for scaling it you just add more servers to it in the inputs. It's rather straightforward. 

We've had a couple of calls with technical support. They're very good, from what I have experienced. We are quite satisfied with their level of knowledge and responsiveness.

The initial setup is somewhat okay. They're not too complex. There are various components that have to be installed and configured, and therefore a little bit of expertise is required. It's not dead simple. You do need some background.

Ours was a smaller deployment and it's supposed to host around 800 different current virtual instances. Starting from the backend stack to going live, it took approximately two weeks overall.

It is more economical than purchasing each license individually. If you purchase vSphere Enterprise plus vSAN, then vROps, and then Horizon, it's going to be a large cost. If you do this logic, it will be very cheaper, because they did not charge us separately for the vSphere or vSAN or vROps with this. You buy the number of seats irrespective to how much hardware you run on, they will not charge you more. That's the benefit.

We aren't on the latest version of the solution. We're at minus one right now. The final upgrade has not been done due to the pandemic situation.

In our kind of environment, it's just more of a media use case, so we used it and it made sense. If you have variable workloads, not a uniform workload, then it might not go under the licensing for just VDIs, asVDIs specifically cover your operating system instances as well as uniform with the VDI clients. If it is a uniform VDI client, such as all Windows 10 systems for users to log in, like on host environment, or it's all a server farm, etc., for those kinds of environments, Horizon is a no brainer. 

A company should go for it. I'd recommend it. It is a good solution to work with.

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten. For the most part, we've been quite satisfied with the results.

VMware Horizon 7 has its proprietary Elastic streaming protocol, which is very good for delivering VDI. It helps with graphic-intensive applications.

The experience is seamless for graphic-intensive applications using this particular protocol.

It's difficult to recall any areas that need improvement. 

They are growing now, in particular with this VDI domain. VMware is now introducing new products and features, and they are onboarding new customers.

There are many competitors in the market. All of the Media in Apple products delivery is seamless. 

They need to advertise the product well and focus on their core features. 

They need to market accordingly and they will have a good future and a good experience for the end customers.

I would like to see seamless integration with the cloud because right now, the dependency is on the cloud providers. I would like to see them have their own cloud environment on any public cloud. Right now, it is split between the public cloud and the VMware cloud environment. If they could deliver a solution that integrated all of the components then it would be great. They would not have to manage two different consoles but rather, a single implementation and a single console.

I have been working with VMware Horizon 7 for more than one year.

It's a stable solution.

It's easy to scale. Once you have it in your environment it's can be easily scaled.

Technical support is good.

The initial setup is straightforward.

If the customer already has a VMware virtualized platform then it's a seamless deployment.

Even the ordering and packaging is simple because it can be combined with the server virtualizing platform. You just order a one-part code that includes everything in that solution, including the VDI platform.

It can take approximately one week to deploy if it is on-premises, and if on the cloud, depending not the workload, it can take a day or two.

They have both options of deployment models. If it is on-premises, it's as per their proprietary prerequisite. With the cloud, they have AWS and Microsoft Azure.

I would recommend VMware Horizon 7 if the customer already has the VMware virtualized environment in place.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The ability to log in from anywhere is huge. Remote access is a third party product, but with them working together, it's is great.

I would say that it’s a more secure environment for desktops than a physical environment.

Right now, we use a third party product to do the VDI administration, which has been fairly good for us. We’re looking for one vendor to be able to manage all aspects of the stack to make it more efficient and stable.

Not so stable – there’s a lot of new issues that we have not experienced before on the physical desktop side that become challenges for us when trying to solve on the client side. This is really an infrastructure side product, so troubleshooting for us from the client side is more difficult, and we tend to need to escalate and get assistance from the infrastructure staff frequently.

We kind of halted everything simply because of several technical issues that needed to be resolved to make the old system more stable before we plan on rolling out more. We’re currently looking at going to a generation 2 VDI with vCenter 6 and Horizon View 6.

I've indirectly dealt with them. My staff have opened cases with VMware, and they’ve always been good to work with. However, sometimes our issues are in house, or caused by a third party, so it’s difficult to know how to divide and conquer, from where we sit at client support.

The CIO had a vision and wanted to push toward the anytime anywhere capability for our customers.

I wasn’t involved, but I’m sure they looked at Citrix.

We look at a products, the ability to respond quickly and completely are important. I would wait until the whole system matures a little more and comes together as far as where everything is under one vendor, so that it’s more stable and efficient. A few technical bugs need to be worked out, and we had some trouble with video display, and that could’ve been avoided.

We use this solution for virtual servers and virtual desktops. Our whole environment is on VMware combined with Nutanix.

I appreciate the ability to have a more centralized environment.

In the next release, I would like to have more support when optimizing the master templates for PDI. There are tools that are available to be used but they are not supported at the moment and are more, "use at your own risk."

I have been using this solution for more that fifteen years.

The performance was lacking a bit in the beginning due to the old infrastructure with SAN and having everything separated. Now that we use this in combination with Nutanix, it is quite stable.

We are easily able to add another house to the Nutanix farm which would result in more resources for VMware.

As a result of using VMware, we have to buy less hardware and do not need to replace thin clients.

I would advise potential users to create a template to test if the performance is good enough for your client level.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten.