Horizon 8 Reviews

With a user base of around four thousand individuals, maintaining a vigilant stance on security is essential. Regular scrutiny of each endpoint is necessary to prevent any potential threats to our data center, such as infections, compromises, or hacks. The overarching goal is to maintain a tight grip on our data and keep it secure within our data center.

It's a solid product with favorable pricing, versatile use cases, and seamless implementation. It stands as a robust setup with considerable capabilities.

Addressing the technical aspect, one potential area for improvement lies in the lock-on times. With the introduction of instant clone technology, which is a cost-effective and resource-efficient solution, there has been a slight increase in log-on times, now reaching up to fifteen seconds. While this shift prioritizes security, it's worth considering if there are any adjustments that could further optimize performance without compromising security. A significant concern in Belgium, particularly with its stringent privacy regulations, is the adherence to the global standards for data protection. It would be beneficial if VMware invested in developing a robust reporting engine, providing insights into user activities, locations, and more. This becomes crucial, especially in the context of remote work, where customers often seek detailed reporting to understand how and where their teams are working.

I have been working with it for ten years.

It offers excellent stability capabilities.

Its scalability is designed to handle rapid adjustments, allowing for setups from zero to full capacity in less than three seconds. There are approximately four and a half thousand end users.

Before the introduction of VMware Horizon, Citrix was the primary solution. However, the transition to VMware Horizon was driven by its more advanced technology, straightforward licensing model, easy setup process, and comprehensive integration.

The key lies in effective preparation, particularly in deploying a Golden Image.

The successful deployment of Horizon relies on careful preparation, client collaboration, and aligning requirements. Despite the common oversight of reading the manual, it is crucial for a smooth process. Horizon's setup is generally user-friendly and backed by effective courses and online resources. A strong grasp of VMware is necessary, and addressing any weaknesses in the VMware data center is recommended before proceeding. Notably, while Horizon is not demanding on CPU and memory, the critical concern often lies in the storage layer. Therefore, meticulous planning, a robust VMware foundation, and focused attention on the storage layer are key for optimal performance. If you're starting from scratch to build a cluster for providing virtual desktops to around two hundred users, the project timeline is estimated to be approximately three to four weeks. In terms of resource requirements, this can be effectively managed by a team of two people over the specified duration.

The pricing is quite reasonable.

When contemplating a shift to the cloud, thorough cost calculations are essential due to the dynamic nature of cloud models. Horizon, focused on the modern workspace, provides cost control in on-premises environments. It's important to assess whether the claimed functionalities of the cloud align with your needs and if you can manage associated costs. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

We use it to gain access to our organization's applications.

One of the most valuable aspects is that I can connect from home, and the system operates seamlessly. It offers great flexibility, allowing us to access it as a complete virtual machine or even just as individual applications.

There is room for a more cost-effective pricing structure, as it could be more affordable.

I have been using it for approximately four years.

I would rate the stability capabilities eight out of ten.

I would rates its scalability abilities eight out of ten.

Whenever we submit a ticket, there is a productive exchange of information, and more often than not, they manage to address our needs effectively. While there may be occasional challenges, the support is generally quite reliable. I would rate it nine out of ten.

Positive

We use a combination of Citrix, Horizon, and Microsoft for virtual apps and desktops based on specific requirements and customer needs.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The deployment was managed by our team, and I handled the installation. The client only had to perform the minimal configuration, such as setting the server's IP. It was highly adaptable and user-friendly, and it took approximately a couple of days.

We observed a return on investment in data protection, resulting in a time savings of around twenty five percent.

It falls on the more expensive end in terms of cost.

You can consider using Microsoft Remote Desktop sessions, which provide a more basic set of features if you don't require all the advanced features offered by Horizon, such as speed optimization, visual enhancements, desktop printing, image resolution, and a seamless user experience. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

The use cases mainly depend on our client's needs and requirements. One of the reasons is the high cost of hardware and associated maintenance and time it requires. When you have 300-600 systems, managing maintenance tickets and replacements becomes a significant challenge.

With a stable VDI in place, clients/end users experience fewer issues. A large number of users can easily have required changes in configurations across the entire stack on the back end without disruption to their work. VMware Horizon offers additional features in VDI that are not possible with localized systems or laptops. We are currently utilizing it partly with labs involving DNA analysis and with various forensic tools. However, its primary use case is for office environments.

It gives you better control and management options for adjusting performance requirements and securing the environment.

The use of VMware Workspace ONE with Horizon is quite impressive. VMware Horizon availability on both the cloud and on-prem and its flexible licensing options are worth noting. 

In addition, combined with ThinApp it offers efficiency and stability for the system, which is not always available in alternate solutions.

Speaking from my perspective, I think they could work on reducing the cost. There is room for improvement in the pricing model. 

I would like to see improvement in the license cost and the availability of perpetual licensing for Horizon. The solution offers a Term and subscription license.

We started setting up VMware VDI solutions many years ago, but the most recent deployment was completed in March 2023. The latest installation is of Horizon 8 and it's been a month since it was deployed.

It is stable. However, when shifting from a laptop or desktop environment, there are certain expectations that need to be set correctly. For example, users in some lab environments or universities have a habit of shutting down systems at day's end. It can be inconvenient and it either needs to be disabled or the VMs need to be restarted. These challenges can be addressed within a couple of weeks, and then everything becomes stable. So, stability improves over time with proper configuration and SOPs and as users grow accustomed to new environments.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. 

It is highly scalable. The architecture allows POD architecture/design, accommodating anywhere from 300 to 20,000 end devices/sessions. The scalability depends on the specific needs and the capabilities of the network infrastructure.

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

From a technical standpoint, VMware Horizon is quite reliable and stable when compared to other products. It certainly has an edge in terms of stability.

The installation can be either simple or complex, depending on your desired configuration and the type of integrations you need with active directories and shares. There are plenty of options available. 

If you want a basic setup, it can be easily configured. However, you should have a good understanding of how the product needs to be set up. It's not overly simple, but it's not overly difficult either. The documentation is very comprehensive and helpful. As long as you have knowledge of the product and its components, such as the Connection Server and the licensing features, you can successfully configure it. Some training and support may be required.

If you have the necessary training, it will be easier to handle the deployment process.

The deployment time depends on factors such as the number of applications, templates, clients, and desired features. Generally, you can deploy it within two to three days and start working. We have two engineers for the deployment.

The same two engineers handle the maintenance as well.

VMware Horizon has subscription-based TERM licenses with many flexible options. I would really consider it to be of great value if VMware starts to offer perpetual licensing which used to be available.

We work with Several Virtualization Technologies and HCI systems including VMware vSphere, Oracle OVM, IBM PowerVM, Sangfor, Huawei FusionSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and H3C Workspace/VirtualDesktop. Nevertheless for VDI, our primary choice has been VMware Horizon to date.

If you have large contact center users or significant office users, and you are looking for a long-term ROI over a period of ten years or more, VMware VDI would be a suitable choice.

It is a method of providing a user with access to centralized resources in the form of either a full desktop session or a hosted application, whether it is Windows or Linux.

Horizon is known for its simplicity, security and flexibility in its deployment. It allows for simplified management, advanced user configuration and application deployment, all at speed and at scale. Horizon 8 improves on all of these, as most things can be automated by using either Powershell or REST api, and instant cloning is still the fastest way of creating virtual desktops, especially at scale.

Users can now access resources in a safe and simple way, using the same form of authentication as our other resources. They now have access to high performance desktops in the data centre or public cloud, by using hardware graphics acceleration in the servers hosting the VDI desktop solution. Data now stays securily in the data centre and users have incredibly fast access to it, since the desktops now live right next to that data.

The user can now use any endpoint they have available, since all they need is an HTML5 compatible browser or Horizon Client for their specific OS to be able to access the solution.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the ability to provide secure remote access to resources.

A simple way to load-balance components like the Connection Servers, Unified Access Gateways, App Volumes managers and Recording servers.

Since Omnissa Horizon lacks a load-balancing component, you must always use a third-party solution to be able to provide high availability for these components.

I would like to see simple load-balancing for smaller environments that do not have access to large enterprise solutions like F5 or AVI; components should be able to be made redundant or high available in a simple way.

Perhaps limited to only two components; if more are required, a paid load balancing solution can be used.

I have been working with Omnissa Horizon for approximately fifteen years.

The first one I built was version four.

We are working with version eight, and our customers run version seven and some are already on version eight. 

Version seven is already out of support.

The most recent version is 8.16, but they no longer use that numbering; it is now 2506. The new numbering reflects the month and year of release.

The stability of Omnissa Horizon is incredible for both Horizon version seven and version eight.

The only reason the basic component connection server failed was that there was something broken underneath, either storage, compute or antimalware solutions. Horizon itself rarely has any issues.

At present, Omnissa Horizon scales up to 250,000 concurrent sessions.

In my opinion, Omnissa Horizon is a very scalable product. The most prominent companies in the world use it. Some require it to scale to that level, which is why the product is capable of doing so.

I would rate the technical support a four out of five. Since the breakup with Broadcom, support staff has ofcourse decreased, but the focus has increased. There are now only a few products that support actually has to know, which helps in the focus. Responses have been fast and escalating things to the right level seems to be a lot speedier than before.

At this moment, the level of support is mature and still growing.

Positive

I have had experience with Microsoft and Citrix. The switch was made due to the integration capabilities of Horizon with VMware vSphere. This combination is still unique, although they now come from seperate companies. Agreements exist for the next 10 years, so this combination will remain strong for the time being.

It can be deployed in your private cloud, a public cloud, or a hybrid of the two. 

Omnissa Horizon only has one license, which is a license to run desktops. They don't care if you run them on Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba, your own data center, or a combination of those.

There is a cloud platform included to be able to govern it, the Horizon Cloud Console.

The initial setup is dependent on what you compare it to. 

When referring to an on-premises installation, the infrastructure isn't that complex; otherwise, it's just the cloud, which is a service that you use, and that is not necessarily complex.

On-premises you have some components, and there is some designing involved, especially if the environment is medium to large.

The complexity is in your data and your applications, not in Omnissa Horizon.

A PoC is set up in a couple of days.

The basic environment depends on the organization; for example, a complete infrastructure for a large company can take two weeks to set up. You are dealing with a lot of integration with other components, and setting up load balancers and certificates.

It is worth the investment. We have numerous customer success stories about how great Omnissa Horizon is as a product and how it has solved problems for them.

It lowers endpoint costs, reduces IT management overhead, enhances security and compliance, it can help workers gain productivity and provide business continuity and disaster recovery, provides scalability and is cloud flexible.

Simply put:

I am aware of the license models, but not the prices. There are multiple licensing options, please refer to https://www.omnissa.com/horizo... for more information.

I have had experience with Microsoft and Citrix, which are both either lacking in funtionality or now way too expensive.

Do a proof of concept. Set out your requirements and compare them to what the solution can provide.

It is a complete product.

It is fully mature, easy to manage, and it is easy to design if you know what you are doing. 

It is stable and there are new features that come from the new release twice a year.

Our organization is a national cybersecurity agency in Qatar, and we need virtual machines that automatically erase once the user logs out. The solution also enables access to our organization's secured environment through the Internet. For instance, you can be anywhere in the world and still access the on-premises infrastructure securely. 

Once our organization upgraded to the latest version of VMware Horizon, we eliminated the delayed login times we had faced in the prior version. The USB redirection is one of the valuable features of VMware Horizon.

Using the aforementioned feature, I have allowed access to certain types of USB models, and only these authorized models by the employer are accessible in the VDI environment, therefore any USB outside the whitelisted manufacturers won't function in our organization's environment. 

I also find the solution's Unified Access Gateway (UAG) feature useful as it makes administration tasks easier. For instance, if I want to enable a particular network device to access VMware Horizon, UAG makes such processes quick and easy.

At our organization, we are also using VMware Workspace ONE for endpoint management, which facilitates the employees' ability to bring their own devices, which can be used to access the on-premise infrastructure and the applications present on it. 

There are some licensing issues in VMware Horizon, but I believe that the vendor will be able to resolve them soon. Our agency is used to traditional licenses, and when Broadcom acquired the product, they made some changes in the licensing. In the long term, the latest product licensing model might be more beneficial. 

I have been using VMware Horizon since 2018. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. The solution can be effortlessly scaled unless and until there are issues with the on-premise infrastructure. Presently, our organization has 2,500 VMware Horizon users. 

Our agency has production support from VMware, but there have been very few instances where we needed to reach out to customer support, which were some rare issues that our team couldn't troubleshoot on their own. Only in instances similar to zero-day vulnerabilities did our agency contact customer support. I would rate the customer support a ten out of ten. 

Positive

Previously in our agency we were using SCCM from Microsoft but VMware Horizon is easier to manage. But both aforementioned vendors have some interdependence when deploying either of their products. For instance, when you want to deploy VMware Horizon you need to use some Microsoft products such as Active Directory and DNS. For end users in our agency, we use Microsoft products and for applications, Linux servers are used. 

The initial setup process is extremely simple, you just need to run the domain controller and active directory and the rest of the setup is related to network communication. The clear and concise documentation from VMware Horizon further assists in the seamless setup process. Any professional with a couple of years of experience in system administration can effortlessly deploy the product. 

VMware Horizon and other products from the vendor are not aimed at small businesses; it's rather ideal for mid-scale and enterprise businesses. VMware Horizon can be considered to be slightly expensive. 

The solution's instant clone technology is used in our organization, which facilitates the auto-deletion of machines once the user logs out. Upon logging in again, a new machine with a new hostname is assigned. 

VMware Horizon can be easily integrated with other tools due to the presence of effective documentation that is easy to access and comprehend. The employees and the end-users of our agency are highly satisfied with the product. 

VMware Horizon supports both on-prem and VDI cloud-based deployment models. I would rate the product a ten out of ten. I would definitely recommend the solution to others, especially for every VDI use case. 

The use case is remote access to VMs. It allows us to remote access the VMs and our servers.

It's centralized management, and you have access gateway to enter the VMs from outside.

The issue now with VMware is that we don't know the future of the solution. Because if you follow the news, it was acquired by another company, and they are changing the old product line. 

I have been using VMware Horizon View for 34 years. 

The solution is highly stable. I rate the stability eight out of ten. 

The initial setup is easy. The deployment took a few weeks time. I would rate the setup an eight out of ten. 

The deployment was done in house with two people. One person is required for maintenance.

The solution is expensive. 

Overall I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

Our primary use case for VMware Horizon is facilitating remote access to our compute clusters for our developers. VMs predominantly run on Linux systems, specifically utilizing RHEL 8. The developers connect from various locations in Europe.

The product integration on local client machines running Linux needs improvement.

We have been using VMware Horizon for four months.

We have approximately 100 VMware Horizon users in our organization. We never encounter any challenges for scalability.

We have escalated the issues related to backup during the USB tunnel integration process for virtual machines.

Positive

The initial setup was easy, including the onboarding process. It took us two and a half months to complete, which was longer than expected due to the vacation season. We have to update the triggers for maintenance.

We took help from a third-party vendor for implementation.

At present, they provide decent pricing in terms of bundled licenses. However, they might increase the price after the acquisition.

VMware Horizon has proven to be the only best product for enabling individuals across Europe to efficiently run jobs on our compute cluster while accessing the graphical user interface of their Linux machines. The main benefit lies in robust security features.

From the point of view of virtual desktop deployment, it gives standardized access to our users. Its most valuable feature is the rapid and versatile access from clients operating on various Windows, Linux, and MacOS systems. It has benefited users in terms of speed and reliability of the connection, including security aspects. We never encountered any issues related to the reliability and uptime of the platform.

One area for enhancement in VMware Horizon that would greatly benefit our use cases involves improved support for USB connectivity, allowing seamless tunneling of USB devices from laptops to the virtual machines running in the VDI. Additionally, addressing a bug related to integrating Active Directory and Linux environments is crucial for reliability.

We have designed an independent IT infrastructure for Horizon. Thus, the scalability creates no disturbance to our overall infrastructure.

We have compared a few features of other open-source products. VMware Horizon is better in terms of graphical user interface for Linux users.

I advise others to consider infrastructure, virtualization, network, and storage requirements before making a purchase decision.

I rate VMware Horizon an eight out of ten.

I use VMware Horizon as a VDI software since I use a workstation where access is needed for the virtual desktop.

The benefits of the product stem from the fact that it is cheaper for a company when a user accesses the workstation with the help of Linux. It is possible to set up a workstation with the help of a Linux system, after which its users can only access Linux within their Windows system.

The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that it is easy to set it up, and the user experience it provides is just like a normal desktop.

I don't know what needs improvement in the product since it is a standard system, and that is okay.

The product fails to support Mac or Apple workstations. The product should be able to support Mac or Apple workstations, like how it supports Windows and Linux.

The UI of the solution needs improvement, and there is a need to upgrade some of the systems in our environment to ensure better IOPS on our systems. Presently, the IOPS rate is lower than usual for our systems, which might be because of the hardware we use in our company.

I have been using VMware Horizon for more than three years. I work with the old version of the product.

Most of the tool's users are not really satisfied with the product, and I guess that the solution was mostly used for development purposes.

It is a scalable solution. If users want more memory, they can add memory automatically or add more disk space if required.

Our company only has 10 or 20 users of the solution. Earlier, we had hundreds of users of the product in our company.

Proxmox is an open-source solution that I use. Compared to VMware Horizon, Proxmox is a free and open-source solution for which there is no need to pay anything toward the licensing charges. Compared to Proxmox, VMware Horizon is a more stable tool.

The product's onboarding process consisted of a simple installation process.

The solution provider took care of the product setup phase.

There is no maintenance required for VMware Horizon, and all a user has to do is upgrade the solution whenever required. The product notifies its users of the upgrades that it provides.

Google Workspace is a good alternative to VMware Horizon Horizon. Google Workspace functions as a cloud-based product. Users who want a solution deployed on an on-premises model can opt for VMware Horizon.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.