VMware Horizon View - PCs of the Future!
October 12, 2016

VMware Horizon View - PCs of the Future!

Adam Borecki | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with VMware Horizon View

VMware Horizon View is being used for our employees to access their desktops. Half of our company is working off of VMware Horizon View.

This addresses the need for PCs to be deployed and accessed all over the company. We are no longer purchasing physical desktops for our users as everyone is now getting a Wyse P25 device as well as a virtual desktop. The Virtual Desktops are allowing our users access no matter where they are sitting. Huge help for IT as we do not have to move big desktops around anymore.

VMware Horizon View has allowed us to manage our PCs more efficiently and effectively. Users are organized into different groups called "Pools" and we can make sure that their desktops are running all the time or shut them down when they aren't being used.

  • Ability to set up new desktops quickly.
  • Faster boot times for PCs.
  • Virtual machines can grow in space and other resources as long as the ESXi Hosts have the resources.
  • Ability to create different types of desktop groups called pools and organize the different departments.
  • Floating Pools need a bit more configuration to get working properly.
  • Persona management for Floating Pools can be hit and miss depending on how big the users files are.
  • Need to have View Composer set up on a different server in order for it to be recognized.
  • VMware Horizon View has limited customizations.
  • Saved money on PC purchases.
  • Save a lot of man hours by not having to image new PCs. We just create one Template VM and clone the others from that.
  • Bit of a learning curve to get the deployment right for the environment.
  • Ability to make sure VMs always turn back on once they are shutdown. This speeds up load times for users.
  • Less management for our PCs. If one gets a virus or something corrupts we just refresh it and within 5 minutes the user is back to work.

Did not do a full evaluation on Citrix XenDesktop as VMware Horizon View integrates nicely with the VMware vSphere environment that we had currently set up.

We were using PanoLogic for about 6 months before we scrapped it and moved onto VMware Horizon View. Horizon View gave us much more insight into the environment, was simple to use, gave us much more customization over our VMs and also allowed us to automate processes since it was directly tied into vSphere.

VMware Horizon View is not appropriate for small deployments. I would not recommend it for anything less than 10 users. Users with big profiles may want to use dedicated desktops instead of non-dedicated desktops as it will help with loading times.

VMware Horizon View is greatly suited for more than 20 PCs that need to be deployed. VMs can be created from a template and built within 5 minutes. Pools can be used to organize your departments as well as meeting rooms. If setting up a floating pool all you need to do is create one master VM and all the others are linked to it. This allows you to only have to update one VM for updates and software. Everything is then pushed to the other linked clones once you refresh the pool.