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.

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.

The administrative console – it allows us to do a lot from the back-end where we don’t have to impact the users at all.

We can spin up a virtual machine real quick for any solutions that any end-user needs. That’s what I really like.

Well, one of the features we would like to have (even though it was released last year), was NSX. We’re providing a web portal services so that we can spin out any servers that they need, so those things would help. The NSX is something that we are looking at right now.

It’s very stable. We have a very stable environment. We use a cloud provider to provision our desktop, just trying to get our servers to collaborate together takes a bit of a challenge. It’s an ongoing transition, so the knowledge transition takes a bit of time.

We’ve scaled up a lot. When we first started out, we’re fairly young using a virtual environment. We started with 130, and moved to over 500 now. It’s great and it’s not time consuming at all or difficult. It’s been rewarding to us.

The only downfall in our organization is the budget constraints, as we’re a nonprofit organization, so using a third party cloud provider is not free, so we have to let our user community know about the costs associated with using the environment. It’s a direct cost.

They’re great. They use the case number customer support, and the technician will contact you and you tell them your issues. They give you a knowledge based article, and then if you can’t resolve the issue they will get back with you. They also do a WebEx session with you in figuring our problems. They’re able to resolve it right away. When I have to call them, they’re very good at what they do, and especially talking to somebody on the phone, they’re very knowledgeable in diagnosing issues. They share information, they communicate well, and they give you a comfort zone to make sure you’re ok with everything.

We were using an HP appliance, and we were trying to get away and use what VMware recommended. Our HP appliance was out of warranty and old, and we just needed o upgrade.

The design was complex to understand. When we set it up on our environment, I went through the classes but doing it hands on was a little different. However, after that initial hurdle, it was very clear.

Dependability, stability, and ease of use are what we look for. We looked at Citrix and Microsoft, we went with VMware as we had been using VMWare for the last ten years in our tech lab, so it was easy to just have it across the board.

Definitely. Peer reviews are one of the first things I take a look at before creating my vendor list.

We would have to be completely VMware, i.e every product we have from VMware to have it working perfectly. However, it is great for us right now though.

The most valuable feature is virtual machine provisioning.

We used to have desktops in our class rooms, and now 30% of our classrooms are on VDI. It is very easy to manage centrally and complaints about PCs in classrooms are less than 5% now.

The pools and virtual machine management console should be improved, as there is no way to group PCs in different pools, etc.

I've used it for one year.

No issues encountered.

There have been a few problems.

No issues encountered.

It's good.

I had trouble with tech support one, as the person I was speaking to wasn't good.

No previous solution was in place.

It was a little complex when configuring Active Directory and other server roles.

I implemented it myself.

It is very high, we are planning to introduce to all of our class rooms.

Pricing is high as VMware costs are always high.

No other options were evaluated.

It is a good solution, it is stable.

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.