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Streamline your desktop management, increase ROI, and eliminate troublesome variances
October 17, 2019

Streamline your desktop management, increase ROI, and eliminate troublesome variances

Stefan Semo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with VMware Horizon (formerly VMware View)

As a not-for-profit educational institution, we needed a way to reduce costs while controlling productivity and maintaining standards across our schools and offices. Deploying independent operating systems on standalone hardware provides better performance due to lack of layering, but in the end, the costs and efforts to deploy, manage and update/maintain are many orders of magnitude more problematic. Horizon allows us to dynamically manage computer and storage resources, as well as networking, to achieve a cohesive deployment platform, reduce costs and complexity. With a small IT systems team and helpdesk, most issues are resolved quickly and equality without the need to dispatch engineers or rebuild computers.
  • Keeping a configuration consistent across large numbers of devices.
  • Reducing costs of deployment.
  • Greatly simplifying management.
  • It improves security and simplifies compliance.
  • Leverages datacenter resources for multiple desktops.
  • 3D support could be optimized, but most organizations do not have a big need for it.
  • It cannot suit every business need and should be evaluated based on organization requirements.
  • Until version 7 it was very hard to deliver space-optimized desktop pools without instant clones.
  • It allows us to maintain a small and agile IT team.
  • Reduces overhead in staffing and need to dispatch technicians.
  • It provides almost real-time updates and maintains consistency on the virtualized platform.
Some of the platforms are designed for smaller or standalone environments and do not allow for large-scale centrally controlled deployments. in the case of Citrix, there was better Chrome OS support but the lack of PCoIP UDP optimizations made is slower and less desirable by the test subjects. As an educational institution we also received a better educational discount for WMware Horizon and did not ned to pay upfront, but instead, the monthly pricing model of WMware Horizon allowed us to adjust the costs based on the changing counts of named and concurrent users.
No service is perfect for every organization's needs but we found that VMware Horizon support from VMware was very good for us. It was very easy to open a support case and have it escalated based on priority. The support staff was responsive to our needs and understood the nuances of using the solution in a schooling environment. VMware also has an extensive library of content and technical articles, demonstration videos and other training content which is invaluable.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of VMware Horizon go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy VMware Horizon again?

Yes

The best scenario for VMware Horizon is in businesses where there is consistency needed for a platform. For example in education, healthcare and government. All these enterprises need a consistent platform and depend on having access to the same applications at the same version and build levels as well as the same databases. They all have cloud-based or datacenter-based resources that can be leveraged to deploy desktop virtualization.
As for less appropriate scenarios, any small organization that does not benefit from centralized resources (servers) would not be able to deploy desktop virtualization without initial investments in the infrastructure that would not be justified.