VMware Horizon View REVIEW - 8 out of 10
Updated October 16, 2015
VMware Horizon View REVIEW - 8 out of 10
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
5.3
Overall Satisfaction with VMware Horizon View
VMware Horizon View is currently being used by the IT staff at the VCCS System Office. It solves the problem of secure remote access without the need for VPN and/or remote desktop. There are also several employees using thin clients as their primary computing device and those users connect to virtual desktops running on the VMware Horizon View platform.
- Integrates with Active Directory for single sign-on.
- If you are already familiar with VMware infrastructure products, the installation process is fairly straightforward.
- Linked clones simplifies management by giving you one place to make changes and the ability to deploy those changes to an entire pool of VMs.
- Fine tuning needs to take place at the storage level to ensure optimal performance.
- When using linked clones, you must refresh your master image periodically. The longer the clones run and grow, the more performance will degrade.
- In order to have the best desktop experience possible, a GPU card needs to be added to each ESX host for video processing/offloading.
- For my company, it was about finding a solution to our remote access problem. We were already heavily invested in VMware in our data centers. VMware Horizon View was the natural choice when looking at virtual desktop solutions (ROI was not a factor in this case).
XenDesktop is a good product and has its advantages. It comes down to where you want the processing to take place (the server in the data center or the client endpoint). Regarding cost, the infrastructure needed to deploy the Citrix solution is more expensive than VMware's product. Since my company already had a virtual environment running on the VMware platform, it made sense to deploy VMware Horizon View.