View solves some of the Windows 10 migration headaches
Updated October 30, 2019

View solves some of the Windows 10 migration headaches

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with VMware Horizon (formerly VMware View)

VMware is being used by our organization to assist with the rollout of Windows 10. Instead of reimaging and moving all the user data to a new full system we use thin clients that connects to an orchestrator that goes to each View pool of computers. It makes a lot easier and trims down man hours for this migration.
  • It provisions and works with vCenter very well to access new virtual machines.
  • There is very little I need to perform on the systems infrastructure other than working on images and upkeep.
  • I think they are strengths because with so much that goes into creating a managing the images we roll out the last thing you need to worry about are simple issues with the backend infrastructure.
  • We run into issues a decent amount of the time with nonpersistent desktops not being able to roll over quick enough. This means the end-user gets a black screen while it gives them a new machine. They don't know that so we receive calls that users cannot connect to VMware.
  • The upgrade process is fairly tedious and most of the knowledge-based articles from VMware are not really real-world scenarios.
  • The support for this is not the greatest. Each time we have reached out to support for assistance the process has been drawn out and usually, we are unable to get an engineer who is knowledgeable on the phone until we reach out to our contact at VMware.
  • We don't have to pay a bunch of helpdesk people to troubleshoot workstations.
  • We don't have to buy full workstations for the users.
  • We can maintain this a lot easier when issues arise with machines.
I have not used any other products similar to View but I have used Citrix for RDS so that users could have a remote profile. This was clunky and became fairly troublesome as the users shared the same server and when one had issues sometimes the whole server had to be rebooted. I definitely prefer VMware over Citrix RDS.
The support has been up and down. Sometimes you can get a really intelligent engineer that will understand that you have knowledge of the product and not troubleshoot the little things while others will start at the very bottom and can take an exorbitant amount of time to get to the core problem. The support from VMware has been sliding for the past few years and doesn't seem to be getting better. It seems that any time you want good support you need to reach out to either a TAM or account representative to get help.

Do you think VMware Horizon delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with VMware Horizon's feature set?

Yes

Did VMware Horizon live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of VMware Horizon go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy VMware Horizon again?

Yes

I think for a situation where you would need a small number of images for users that need basic things out of their non-persistent linked clone. This becomes more and more difficult when you have a complicated environment when you have people who want one-offs for their machines. Then you are managing a ton of persistent machines which can be fairly difficult but even so when you need a new machine you can always spin a brand new one up quickly. All in all this product is useful from A-Z but when using the non-persistent make sure that your image is a very basic image and won't need a ton of fine-tuning or changes. That's where things get difficult.