Horizon 8 Reviews

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.

We primarily use the solution for developer access within the company.

The solution's most valuable aspect is the VDI - the remote virtual desktop interface. We really enjoy using the remote desktop.

The solution can scale.

The product has been quite stable so far. The performance is very good.

The solution is quite expensive. They should work to lower the costs if possible.

The deployment of the product can sometimes be difficult. It would be ideal if the whole process was more simplistic.

There needs to be more documentation. If there was, it might help make the initial setup a bit easier. They need to provide users with more manuals.

The technical support could be more responsive.

I've been using the solution for about five years at this point. It's been a while. We have quite a bit of experience with it internally.

The product is quite stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution scales. A company could expand it if they needed to.

We have about 20 users on the solution currently.

We do not have plans to increase usage at this time.

Technical support could be better. They take too long to respond right now. We aren't quite satisfied with the level of support they provide to our organization.

We did previously use Hyper-V by Microsoft. We had issues with its performance and stability and decided to move to this product instead.

The initial setup is not always straightforward. It can be a bit complex, a bit difficult. We struggle with some aspects of the configuration which slows things down during the implementation. We have two companies and we've found that the configuration has been a real challenge for them.

In general, the deployment took us about two days to complete.

We have three people that handle the deployment and maintenance process.

We used a reseller that assisted us with the implementation. They were quite knowledgeable and it helped to have them during the process.

The solution is pricey. The cost of it is high.

That said, I do not have the full details on the exact cost to our organization.

We did look at a few other options before ultimately settling in with this product. I do not recall all of the names. The stability and the response to backups are what sold us on this product.

We are customers and end-users of the solution.

We're always using the latest version of the solution. For VMware, we're on version 7.7.

I'd recommend the solution. I'd rate it at an eight out of ten overall. For the most part, it's worked well for us and the performance is quite good, however, I'd rank it higher if it had more documentation and manuals that could assist with configuration and the initial deployment.

Being able to centrally manage our environments from one pane of glass.

Before we virtualized it was stand alone systems, now I can see all ten sites we manage, and manage the systems. If we need to make changes, we can do it with a snapshot. It's much easier than before, plus we now have visibility into everything going on.

One thing is I'd like to be able to see I/O acceleration within VMware instead of having to use a third party, like VMTurbo.

We haven’t had any issues – its worked really well.

With virtual environments, we are highly scalable. Before, when we had a physical environment adding a server was a whole process, now we have a base VM, and we just add it, provisioning servers is nothing. Now it takes two to three hours, instead of two to three weeks.

I haven’t had any issues. They're easy to get hold of, and they're able to help with all our issues.

There was no other solution in place.

It was fairly straightforward. It took getting used to the new technology but it wasn’t too difficult.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients. I am a solution engineer and I work on end-user virtualization and related infrastructure solutions. I with VMware, Citrix, and Nutanix.

This solution is used for managing end-user workstations, or settings related to applications or Windows, as well as other things. For example, it can put policies in place for applications or the operating system.

This is not a product that I work with regularly.

The most valuable feature is that it works with virtualization and works with physical systems as well.

It has a lot of features and they are similar to what we have seen in any environment management solution.

Many improvements to this product are needed.

More ready-to-deploy templates should be available. Because they are not included, a lot of configuration is required.

This is a stable product.

VMware User Environment Manager is scalable. Most of our customers are running VMware Virtualization solutions, and they are used to having this to work with it.

Technical support is based on the type of subscription that you have. Generally, it is enterprise customers that have technical support.

In addition to VMware, I work with Citrix and Nutanix. Currently, most of the work I do is with Citrix and VMware products.

A consultant is definitely required because a lot of configuration is needed. The deployment takes at least two weeks to complete.

Once it is deployed, one or two resources are all that are required for maintenance.

The choice of which solution to use is not made by us. It's a customer decision and whatever they choose, whether it is Citrix, VMware, or otherwise, we will work with it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using VMware Horizon View for workstation replacement. We are mostly still in the development stage.

The most valuable feature of this solution has been security.

I have been using VMware Horizon View for approximately one year.

The stability has been good.

Whenever I had to use the technical support from VMware I had a good experience.

The initial setup was not difficult but there is room for improvement.

I rate VMware Horizon View an eight out of ten.

We use this solution to maintain the existing ESXi that we have.

The most valuable feature of the solution is its reliability.

I have been using this solution for a few months.

I have found this solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have not had any issues with the service from the technical support team.

The installation is straightforward.

The price of the solution is affordable. However, there are extra fees for support.

I rate VMware User Environment Manager an eight out 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.