VMware Horizon Cloud Reviews

We don't internally use it, but we have clients who use it. 

I have used it myself in my prior job. We were not using the shared version where you share resources. We had dedicated resources for each desktop, which was one of the reasons why it was a little bit more expensive. This was one of the things I wanted to change before I left because you had people with 8 gigabytes of RAM and two processors assigned to them, but they were just doing emails. 

Every once in a while, they would use full resources while doing complex Excel tasks or something like that. They needed these resources all the time because whenever they didn't have them, the machine would freeze upon them for a little while and then start working, but that is not conducive to being efficient. The only solution was to give them more processing and memory. Unfortunately, that drives up costs because there is a cost associated with every processor and RAM you use. That's really the driving cost of it.

I started getting the shared version where it would fluctuate with what is needed from a pool. In other words, if you had a pool of 120 gigabytes, it would fluctuate depending on the users' needs. If you put 40 users on 128 gigabytes, it is going to be cheaper than giving 40 users 8 gigabytes, which is 320 gigabytes. You cut your costs with that.

It made things a lot easier. The job I was doing was for a non-profit organization, and we were all over the place. People would be doing things in different locations and going through different clients, donators, and so forth. VMware Horizon Cloud made it very simple and quick to bring everything up. All they needed was an internet connection, and things would work for them. It made things very efficient.

I honestly liked the application itself because it was just like using a desktop. You could copy and paste, inside and outside, and you could use multiple monitors. You could access it anytime, anywhere, no matter whether you were in the office or out of the office. I could leave the office, go somewhere, go back in, and everything would be there. I could just leave it up and running. I absolutely love this feature in VMware Horizon Cloud.

It is very expensive. Its price needs to be improved.

They can do a better job with external resources such as a USB or a hard drive. When I tried to connect using these external resources, it failed a lot of times. I had to do a shared connection with a local laptop and then connect from a network standpoint, rather than through VMware Horizon point. They definitely have weaknesses with external connections. A lot of companies probably don't let people use external connections because it defeats the purpose of having a cloud solution and keeping the data in a secure area. You can copy to an external device, and you can lose the data. A lot of companies may not focus on this feature, but if you are providing it, you should make it work.

I have been using VMware Horizon Cloud for five years. 

Its stability was great. It never went down. It was solid. We had one problem early on because we were on an outdated version where it just locked up, and we had to do a reboot of the main server to get everything back up, but that was very early on. Once we got the newest version, everything was fine.

Scalability was very easy. It was a matter of shutting it off and turning it back on, and you have everything you need. You could even do some of the things in real time. If you needed more memory up to a certain point, you didn't even need to reboot. You could just put the memory on, and it would start taking advantage of it.

We had 150 users, and it was all the way from the CEO down to the clerk. It was the only real service. The rule of the business was that everything that you work on has to be on that equipment. You were not supposed to do anything locally on your computer.

We had a managed service provider who handled it, so we never had to deal directly with their technical support. We contacted the managed service provider if any support was ever needed, which worked effectively. We never really had to call VMware technical support.

We used RDP. We had the service, but obviously, RDP has a lot of security flaws. Generally, you are just logging into another machine. With that, you still need machines running and so forth. Technically speaking, although it was VMware, I could get into RDP if I had turned it on. You don't really save much with RDP, and you can't really use it outside the office unless you have it managed to that particular machine for the IP address, whereas VMware Horizon Cloud goes by the domain. You have a web service, a public IP, and the name of the machine assigned to it, and you log in. It knows where to go. With RDP, you can't really do that. Mainly, it was just the higher technical sites that used the RDP version.

The other benefit of VMware was that it allowed us to buy cheaper computers. We didn't need top of the line computers. There could be $500 notebooks, and they would work fine because it was all in the cloud, and it wasn't using local resources.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It wasn't very difficult. Another nice thing was that when I updated servers and so forth, I could do a snapshot. If something failed, I could just restore it rather quickly. It was very functional from that standpoint as well.

It is too expensive as compared to other solutions because of which we don't use it that much. We tend to go more for Hyper-V or Azure just because VMware licensing is quite up there. We sway people away from VMware Horizon Cloud. We have some clients who already have it. They stay on it for a little while, and then most of them end up moving off when we provide them a better solution that isn't as license heavy cost-wise.

Its price is the biggest issue. I didn't have any issues with the product itself. It worked efficiently and effectively. I never really had any issues that I can think of. It is overall a very solid product. 

I would advise others to first do a cost analysis. Make sure that it benefits the business mainly from the cost perspective. Make sure that you have a person who is very knowledgeable and knows how to implement shared resources in an environment. That was one of the issues we had. People who deployed it before I got there didn't understand how to properly deploy it to be most effective from a resource standpoint. There were a lot of wasted resources because they dedicated them to everybody while allocating them out.

I would rate VMware Horizon Cloud a seven out of ten. Price is a pretty big talking point for most companies.

The use cases were around being able to have virtual desktops that were deployable to the public cloud, specifically where customers had a burst type of environment, which means that they needed more virtual desktops in a particular timeframe. It might be at tax time for accountants. 

Another use case was being able to take an on-prem interface and bring it into the cloud so that a customer is able to have all of the goods. They could have their management infrastructure, deployment, and all those things. This was done so that the technical teams would have one less thing to manage and would be able to deploy across clouds, whatever that cloud is. It is a SaaS tool, and the target can be on-prem or a cloud, such as Azure, VMware, or AWS. The great thing about it is that you can deploy it anywhere. We are using its latest version and the previous version.

Its advanced management features are the most valuable, especially power management. One of the really important things was to be able to have power management in a consumption world. This means that unlike a Microsoft environment, you could actually turn off virtual desktops or have them start up and shut down. If you're consuming resources in the public cloud, you want to be able to do that because when you're not using those, such as at the weekend, you want to be able to turn them off. So, the advanced options for managing the BDIs are very important.

There should be more emphasis on the Workspace One access part of the solution. This is essentially identity management provided with Horizon. There needs to be some kind of integration because you are able to have all of these desktops on any device, but you have to have this other component to make it easier from a single sign-on perspective. That's why there should be an emphasis on Workspace One access. It actually comes free with the product, but people don't really know how powerful it can be.

I have been using this solution for the last two or three years.

It is really stable.

It is really scalable. It is using the Horizon backbone or the components of Horizon. Even with the basic setup, which has essentially very few components, you can run 10,000 desktops straight off the bat. From the scalability perspective, that's one of the great things. You really are scaling due to the consumption. In other words, you don't have to worry about Horizon components. All you have to worry about is how much money you're spending on the hyperscale or how many resources do you have on-prem. The hyperscalers themselves have plenty of resources.

In terms of the number of users, we have a thousand users. They are a mix of task workers. There are some who just needed desktops, and then there are those who needed a little bit more juice. We weren't using virtual GPU (VGPU), but there were a lot of task worker profiles. It was essentially for a standard Windows 10 desktop that normal people would use with Office and stuff like that.

I have used them. VMware's GSS is good. They have a very skilled set of individuals in the VMware center. They're good. I would rate them a nine out of ten. I would give them a ten, but sometimes, they get busy like everybody else.

They switched from Microsoft to Horizon because you can manage Microsoft by using the Horizon cloud. It also had some of those advanced features that the customer wanted.

Its initial setup is really simple. It is cloud-based. It requires very little setup. After you talk to VMware, you get your own environment up in the VMware cloud. It is all set up for you by VMware, and then from there, you can just log in. When you're in the interface, you can just point to the destination in which you want to deploy, and then you just manage it. It is very simple.

For what you get, it is very compelling. You've got to look at the total cost of ownership of this type of piece of software in terms of being able to utilize it as a cloud service. I don't have to run everything on-premises. When you look at the total cost of just being able to use it and then being able to point it to any public or private cloud, it is very compelling. You have one less thing to manage.

I would say give it a go. It is very easy. You can get a free trial. There is a lot of help and information out there.

I would rate VMware Horizon Cloud a ten out of ten.

I'm using VMware Horizon Cloud for end-user computing solutions from the VMware Cloud and Microsoft Azure for supporting the user's level. We are publishing new images from the backend to the user support team through vSphere and this is where we are monitoring all the VDAs.

Sometimes we will receive a CPU usage alert and we are monitoring through the vSphere client for all the Las Vegas VDA and Reno VDA. We then are supporting these alerts.

VMware Horizon Cloud is easy to use and the full development cloud is very good. The main features of VMware are included. It's a cloud-based virtual desktop infrastructure software that allows you to permit the virtual desktops and applications to any device from the single unified management control. These are managed from the dedicated remote session desktop.

It is a multiple cloud deployment that provides flexibility. You can choose cloud capacity management by VMware or infrastructure management with Microsoft Azure.

Advanced user configuration management through dynamic environment management is available. There are many self-serve options.

I have been using VMware Horizon Cloud for approximately two years.

The solution is stable.

We have approximately 30 people using this solution.

The solution is easy to scale.

We are working on the solution on a daily basis.

Our technical support of VMware is good, but the main problem is it takes a lot of time. That's the main concern about if you raise support or any case from the VMware support team from the VMware portal, but the time taken is a little bit high. The support we did receive was good, they are supporting us well.

After resolving all the issues, they will share the KPI articles through email, what are the steps which were followed to resolve the issue.

I have used Citrix. When comparing VMware Horizon Cloud and Citrix, the main difference is the support and the approach they take. The solutions are similar. VMware has a backend support team.

The deployment can take approximately 24 to 48 hours.

We have a two-person technical team that handles with support of this solution. We do not have a lot of maintenance with this solution.

VMware Horizon Cloud is a low-cost solution. The model that they have is consumption-based. However, some features are expensive.

More people are waiting to adopt a cloud-first strategy, or they are beginning a journey with a hybrid cloud. The cloud is very more important. The Horizon has stepped up to help these people.

VMware Horizon can be delivered on-premise to a variety of public clouds, on both VMware Cloud and other platforms. As per the current status, it is good because it is a service on Microsoft Azure, on the desktop virtualization services available in Azure Market. It is good for new people to work with Azure cloud.

I rate VMware Horizon Cloud an eight out of ten.

We use VMware Horizon Cloud to allow our employees to work remotely.

The most valuable feature of VMware Horizon Cloud is the ability to manage a great number of desktops at once and the remote access for users that are working from outside of the office or from different offices in the country.

The application remoting features have some room for improvement.

I have been using VMware Horizon Cloud for approximately six months.

The stability of this solution is great.

VMware Horizon Cloud is highly scalable.

The technical I have experienced was good. Over the last little while, the quality level of support has diminished a bit and could improve.

The initial setup of VMware Horizon Cloud is fairly straightforward for the infrastructure. However, getting the use cases for each desktop pool can be a challenge.

There is a license required for the use of this solution and there are different tier levels available.

My advice to others would be for them to define their use case before they start.

I rate VMware Horizon Cloud an eight out of ten.