Best of breed VDI. There are none better.
September 14, 2017
Best of breed VDI. There are none better.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with VMware Horizon View
Our organization is extremely VDI-heavy. We have nearly 400 employees. Most users (80%+) rely solely on VDI for access, with 50 or fewer users relying on local access on desktops or laptops. VMWare Horizon makes VDI very easy. The Horizon agent works much better than web access overall, and provides a very fast, reliable VDI connection. The versatility of being able to connect via VMWare Blast or PCoIP is also a great feature if users have trouble with one protocol at home or remotely.
- Easy to use. It is very easy to access Virtual Desktops from VMWare Horizon View. Performance is great, and using the program is practically the same across multiple platforms.
- Multiple platforms. VMWare Horizon View is available on Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, and iOS, amongst others. The user experience is very similar across these various platforms. This is crucially important, especially for unplanned access to VDI when a full fledged Windows/OS X machine isn't available.
- Great performance - Even without especially robust internet connections, the VDI performance is typically very good. I've accessed it at work, in coffee shops, tethered to my phone, and at home. I can almost always get a usable connection regardless of the connection I am using.
- Peripheral access - The peripheral access in VMWare Horizon Client is great! It isn't limited to simple keyboard and mouse access, which certainly does work seemlessly, but also allows multimedia peripherals. We actually have webcams attached to all of our thin and zero clients, and they are perfectly usable from inside VDI, be it in Skype for Business, WebEx, etc.
- USB throughput - USB storage throughput over Horizon isn't great. It definitely needs some tweaking in that regard. It is acceptable for small file transfer from flash drives and the like, but far too slow for large file transfers.
- More connection quality options - There are very limited options for adjusting the connection quality from the Horizon Client. These would be helpful especially when dealing with very low speed connections.
- Resolve minor memory leak issues - The application does sometimes leak memory in Windows 10, causing it to consume more resources than it should.
- Expensive upfront - VMWare Horizon isn't cheap to implement for an organization our size. We spent a great deal of money up front to build out our environment.
- Cheap expansion - While expensive up-front, expanding to accomodate new users is fairly inexpensive. You just expand the infrastructure as needed and let your environment grow. We've grown in size quite a bit in the last 2 years, and it has been a fairly painless process. Where we'd be spending $1600 for a new laptop for a user, we just spend $300 on a zero client and call it a day.
- Increased security - We don't have to worry about users losing a machine and losing data because all of their data is backed up in our VDI and Storage Infrastructure. This is much more difficult to accomplish with traditional physical PCs.
- Accessibility - Being able to access your VDI anywhere in the world without carrying it with you definitely brings an incredible value. It's hard to put a dollar figure on the benefit of being able to do this.
Citrix XenDesktop is another big player in the VDI market, but the product simply isn't as mature or powerful as Horizon. Xen still struggles with Windows 10, whereas Horizon has accomodated every OS we throw at it with ease. XenDesktop is a great product overall, performance over home internet connections is often lacking, whereas Horizon is much more tolerant of slower connections.