VMware Horizon View Reviews

Use as a test center for medical students was the primary purpose of the launch. The number of users seen included was about two hundred. The model was kiosk-mode. Each time, after the end of the virtual machine exam, it was presented. It had to change on the user.

Organizing and integrating is perhaps the most important feature.

Reducing maintenance costs as well as reducing end-time service to end users can be another feature.

Infrastructure equipment and Zero Client. It also has great flexibility in infrastructure changes, both in software and in hardware. You can increase the resources needed by the user or software needed in a few seconds.

Managing all operating systems in a single environment helped a lot in organizing and integrating it. Also, there is no operating system on the user-side hardware.

There is no worry that it will crash and you will be able to recover it in seconds.

Using this solution in medium to large organizations can be justified. Since virtualization is widespread in many organizations today, launching this solution may not require much infrastructure change.

Offices that do not require much processing are a good place to use this solution.

Places such as universities are not suitable for this solution.

The initial startup costs for this solution are relatively high.

Because it's more focused on integration, it's much more flexible and easier to manage.

This solution is Very Scalable

The technical support for this solution is very satisfying.

We tried solutions from Parallels, but it didn't seem right for the organization.

Most organizations have gone to virtualization and VMware clustering. Most of the work is already done.

Our in-house team handled the deployment.

We have seen ROI between two and three years.

The initial startup costs for this solution are relatively high.

Licensing and hardware outsourcing is expensive, but can be cost-effective in the three to five-year range.

Within my company, there are 50 employees using this solution.

Personally, I prefer Citrix, because you can do a lot of things with Citrix. Still, VMware has a lot of experience in virtualization — they are the pioneers in virtualization. They are both great solutions.

This solution is both stable and it's also very secure, too.

It requires some experience to deploy it, but overall, It's not that difficult.

This solution is expensive. A lot of companies in Mexico find that the price is too high.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give VMware Horizon View a rating of ten.

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.

We use the solution for remote desktops for a small number of users, but we do not use Citrix. Therefore, Horizon View is sufficient for us to publish applications or desktops for small services.

The solution has a lot of Visual Desktop's persistent and non-persistent desktops which publish the applications.

The integration could be improved. For example, there could be more integration and easier integration with products such as Okta and Duo. VMware Horizon View could be a multifactor authentication and authorization product, with more options for workflows, user assignments, and group assignments. Currently, it is complicated to configure a demo, so more integration would be beneficial.

I am currently using the solution.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

The best thing about this product was the ease of customizing the terminal, including the ability to add or decrease memory.

One issue we had with this product was that the connection was unstable. Sometimes we had to force values so the end-user could continue working, which caused some information to get lost. 

I have been using VMware Horizon View for around three years.

There were problems with the stability of the product's connectivity, which lowered my rating of the product.

I would rate it an eight out of ten because the connection is unstable. It is really good in the other aspects.

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.