Horizon 8 Reviews

The ability to spin up desktops as quickly as possible. You just build one image and then set multiple images and be ready quickly.

If you have a training session, you can spin up more very quickly, which helps in the training ability for end-users.

I wish there were more standardized instructions and rules. There are too many gotchas.

We're moving to 6.1 from 5.x, so far it's been good. An older version was unstable, but that was before I got there.

There's some little gotchas with moving some up, and you can only have so many VMs, so it does have limitations.

It’s a little advanced because more gotchas (certificates, different servers in different order).

Make sure you know the product, and do a POC first.

In the past, students had to physically go to labs to access software, but now they can access them from any device anywhere, and don’t have to login via VPN because of the security server part of Horizon.

View Persona, it’s been pushed to the wayside because they acquired UEM, and I’d prefer to use it, but have no budget for it. View Persona has less features than UEM, and it doesn’t seem updated, which makes a difference for standard edition users.

It is stable, but it depends on the use case. For us, we use it to allow students to access their desktops anywhere, at anytime. We just use the standard version, not the full enterprise one. We would like to go enterprise, but don’t the have budget for it. But, the standard version has been stable and addressed by support and updates. No issues that would cause us to turn away.

Recently had issue with the 3D application performance with the release of 6.1, and added VGPU support. All we had to do was add hardware (Nvidia K1 cards).

It's responsive, but a few times we had issues with their tech knowledge and troubleshooting steps. We had to escalate the issue and then it was resolved.

It was complex, and many facets on the networking side sit on top of vSphere, with multiple composer engines, and connection servers.

It loses points becuase I can’t take advantage of enterprise stuff. You should do a POC to make sure it fits the use case, three to four month period, and make sure you involve your networking team.

• Control
• Consolidated way of doing updates
• Security

We had to deal with re-imaging hard drives and managing PCs, so having images and desktops to deploy wherever people are without the hardware was really helpful.

I think that simplifying cross-platform use on different devices could be better. Different client versions sometimes don’t work quite as well.

It’s been great – we haven’t had too many issues at all.

Pretty good – we're a pretty small organization, and we have a few hundred desktops but it's been great for what we do.

It’s been good – no complaints at all.

Nope – we went from straight desktops to virtualization.

It’s a little complex, we missed the initial deployment. They were trying to get the most out of the resources on the servers and it undercut what some users needed.

When choosing VMware, we looked at the cost, and value. If they meet what we need, support is important as well. You should get a demo version and try it – see what it actually does before you buy it. I'd rather see it kick the tires than hear what other people have to say.

It’s easy to maintain with the recompose feature. It makes my job easier, as I can update and break the computers, and then rebuild them immediately.

It's basically setting up our training computers much more easily than before – once a user finishes, we can rebuild them again, and we don’t have to worry about security or viruses.

For what we are using it for, it's been very good. I see a lot of needs, but because our environment is constricted for now it meets our needs. If we can go into a cloud environment, then I see a lot of things I would need.

It's easy to deploy.

Very, very good. Reliable, so far I haven’t had any major issues or breakdowns.

I haven’t dealt with it since the product is so simple to use, and the deployment was not too complex. VMware support in general is very good.

We were using Citrix, and Horizon had better features and was easier to adapt. Our Citrix environment was getting old. Also, tech support was a key to change.

Very simple.

We only looked at VMware.

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.