Mastering VMware Horizon 7: Virtualization that can transform your organization , Second Edition

To start with, we are going to introduce, at a high level, the core infrastructure components and the architecture that make up the Horizon View product. We will start with the high-level architecture, as shown in the following diagram, before going on to drill down into each part in greater detail:

All of the VMware Horizon components described in the image are included as part of the licensed product, and the features that are available to you depend on whether you have the Standard Edition, the Advanced Edition, or the Enterprise Edition.

It's also worth remembering that Horizon licensing also includes ESXi and vCenter licensing, to support the ability to deploy the core hosting infrastructure. You can deploy as many ESXi hosts and vCenter servers as you require to host the desktop infrastructure.

In this section, we will cover the core Horizon View features and functionality for brokering virtual desktop machines that are hosted on the VMware vSphere platform.

The Horizon View architecture is pretty straightforward to understand, as its foundations lie in the standard VMware vSphere products (ESXi and vCenter). So, if you have the necessary skills and experience of working with this platform, then you are already nearly halfway there.

Horizon View builds on the vSphere infrastructure, taking advantage of some of the features of the ESXi hypervisor and vCenter Server. Horizon View requires adding a number of virtual machines to perform the various View roles and functions.

An overview of the View architecture for delivering virtual desktops is shown in the following diagram:

View components run as applications that are installed on the Microsoft Windows Server operating system, with the exception of the Access Point, which is a hardened Linux appliance...

In this section, we are going to talk about the different types of desktop assignments and the way a virtual desktop machine is delivered to an end user. This is an important design consideration, as the chosen method could potentially impact on the storage requirements (covered in the next section), the hosting infrastructure, and also which technology or solution is used to provision the desktop to the end users.

One of the questions that always get asked is whether you should deploy a dedicated (persistent) assignment, or a floating desktop (non-persistent) assignment. Desktops can either be individual virtual machines, which are dedicated to a user on a 1:1 basis (as we have in a physical desktop deployment, where each user effectively owns their own desktop), or a user has a new, vanilla desktop that gets provisioned, built, personalized, and then assigned at the time of login. The virtual desktop machine is chosen at random from a pool of available...

One of the main reasons a virtual desktop project fails to deliver, or doesn't even get out of the starting blocks, is down to the heavy infrastructure and storage requirements. The storage requirements in particular are often seen as a huge cost burden, which can be attributed to the fact that people are approaching a VDI project in the same way they would approach a physical desktop environment's requirements. This would mean that each user gets their own dedicated virtual desktop and the hard disk space that comes with it, albeit a virtual disk; this then gets scaled out for the entire user population, so each user is allocated a virtual desktop with some storage.

Let's take an example. If you had 1,000 users and allocated 250 GB per user's desktop, you would need 1,000 * 250 GB = 250 TB for the virtual desktop environment. That's a lot of storage just for desktops and could result in significant infrastructure costs, which could possibly mean that...

The Instant Clones feature is actually a functionality built into the vSphere platform rather than a specific Horizon feature, and was made available from the vSphere 6.0 U1 release, but is only now becoming a supported feature as part of Horizon 7.

It uses the VMware VM Fork technology to very quickly provision virtual desktop machines. An instant clone is created from an already powered on and running virtual desktop machine, called the Parent VM, which is quiesced before the Instant Clone is created. This is what makes Instant Clones quicker to provision than Linked Clones with View Composer.

The Instant Clone shares its memory and its disk with the parent VM for read operations, and is created immediately, and in an already powered-on state, unlike with View Composer-based Linked Clones that have to power-on as part of the creation process. As well as sharing the memory and disk with the parent VM, the Instant Clone has its own unique memory and delta disk file.

The following...

Let's start with a little bit about the background and history behind View Persona Management. View Persona Management was originally a technology product called Virtual Profiles and was acquired by VMware from RTO Software in 2010. It was first introduced with View 5.0, and it allows you to configure user profiles so that they dynamically synchronize with a remote profile repository that is located on a file server in the data center. Its purpose is to manage user profiles within a virtualized desktop environment.

VMware View Persona Management was first introduced with View 5.0, and it allows you to configure user profiles that dynamically synchronize with a remote profile repository located on a file server in the data center.

The VMware UEM product is a new edition to the Horizon portfolio and was added when VMware acquired the Dutch company Immidio back in February 2015. Immidio was a software company that created products that were aimed at helping their consultants out in the field, with the core product being called Flex+.

UEM adds additional functionality above the standard Persona Management solution, also providing a central management console, and delivers personalization of the end user's virtual desktop machine as well as the ability to dynamically configure policies. It works across a number of environments such as virtual desktop machines and physical PCs, as well as cloud-based Windows desktop environments.

There are five key use cases that UEM can be used with...

A question that often comes up when deploying a VDI solution is, how do you manage printing? As your virtual desktop is now effectively running on a server in the data center, does that mean that, when you hit the print button, your print job comes out there? What about printer drivers? Typically, your desktop has the driver installed for the printer that is nearest to you, or it might be a locally-attached printer. Does that mean you need to install every possible printer driver onto your virtual desktop machines? Luckily, the answer to these questions is no, and in this section, we will briefly cover how VMware Horizon View manages printing.

Bundled within Horizon View is an OEM virtual printing solution, ThinPrint, for which a company called Cortado is the OEM. ThinPrint allows your end users to print either to a network-based printer or to a local printer that is attached from the user's endpoint device to their virtual desktop machine via USB redirection...

We are all used to plugging USB devices into our laptops and desktop machines. If you are working in a VMware Horizon View environment, you might want to continue using your USB devices within that virtualized desktop. USB device redirection is a functionality, built into Horizon View, that allows the USB device to be physically connected to the endpoint device while working as if it's connected to the virtualized desktop.

On the flip side, you might want to prevent users from plugging devices into their virtual desktop machines, to ensure you have a secure environment. After all, deploying a VDI environment is one reason companies use to create a secure environment and protect data.

ThinApp is an agentless application virtualization or application packaging solution that decouples applications from their underlying operating systems. It's designed to eliminate application conflict, streamline application delivery, and improve management. ThinApp licenses are included with the Horizon View license and can be used on both physical and virtual desktops, therefore providing a mechanism to deliver applications across all of your desktop models, €”your entire end-user estate.

In a traditional desktop model, an antivirus scanning model agent is installed, runs on every desktop, and is responsible for the performance of antivirus detection scans, while maintaining and updating the definition files containing information about the latest malware.

This model works well in the physical desktop world, but presents some challenges when running in a virtual desktop environment. When a detection scan starts, every virtual desktop's resource usage will increase significantly. This will result in end-user performance degradation, and the desktop host server will become resource-bound. That's fine on a physical desktop, but now in VDI, it's the server hosting the desktops that is going to become resource-bound. When recomposing desktops or building them on demand, the desktops will have to download the definitions file each time, taking up network bandwidth and storage capacity. One last thing you need to take into consideration is...

One of the most important elements of a virtual desktop solution is how you get the screen contents of the virtual desktop machine running in the data center delivered to the user's end-point device, which they are connecting from. To do this, VMware Horizon View uses the PC-over Internet Protocol (PCoIP). In this section, we are going to cover what the PCoIP protocol is and how it works in delivering the end-user experience.

Blast Extreme is a new VMware developed protocol that uses the H.264 video codec as an option if you have the appropriate GPU acceleration resource available, allowing it to deliver the user experience to H.264-enabled client devices. H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10) is an Advanced Video Coding (MPEG-4 AVC) that is a block-oriented motion-compensation-based video compression standard. It's one of the most commonly used video formats and is used for the recording, compression, and distribution of video content such as DVD content.

Blast as a VMware protocol has actually been around for a while, and was first seen in Horizon 5.2 a few years ago, where it was used to deliver HTML5 access to virtual desktop machines. However, now it's not just limited to delivering HTML5 access; it can also deliver the user experience to the latest client devices using standard HTTPS ports.

The Blast Extreme delivery method is also on feature parity with PCoIP, and also supports similar functionality, such...

Now that we have a good understanding of PCoIP, Blast Extreme, and RDP, which one would you choose?

The most compelling reason to go with PCoIP is the fact that it uses the UDP protocol, which is much better suited to streaming media, and therefore lends itself perfectly to the characteristics of virtual desktop delivery, but as discussed, Blast can also use UDP as the delivery protocol. Just to highlight again, UDP is not concerned with how the data ends up on the endpoint device; it's only concerned with the speed of delivery and how quickly it gets there.

On the other hand, RDP uses TCP as its protocol, which is widely used across the Internet. The key difference with TCP is that it is concerned with how the data is being received. TCP requests an acknowledgment from the endpoint device as to whether or not it has received all of the packets successfully. If the endpoint device does not receive what it was expecting, then it replies, asking...

Early versions of virtual desktop technology faced challenges when it came to delivering high-end graphical content, as the host servers were not designed to render and deliver the size and quality of images required for such applications.

Let's start with a brief history and background. Technology to support high-end graphics was released in several phases, with the first support for 3D graphics released in vSphere 5, with View 5.0 using software-based rendering. This gave us the ability to support things such as the Windows Aero feature, but it was still not powerful enough for some of the really high-end use cases due to this being a software feature.

The next phase was to provide a hardware-based GPU virtualization solution that came with vSphere 5.1 and allowed virtual machines to share a physical GPU by allowing virtual machines to pass through the hypervisor layer to take advantage of a physical graphics card installed in the host server...

Like high-end graphics, if we had a conversation about running a unified communications solution or VoIP session on a VDI desktop a couple of years ago, I would have described it as Kryptonite for VDI! Although it technically works, the first call might have an acceptable performance, but adding more users would ultimately bring the servers to their knees with the amount of traffic generated and resources required to conduct the calls. Eventually, the experience would have become completely unusable. Unified comms was not a good use case for VDI.

However, this has all changed and you can now happily use a unified communications solution with your virtual desktop. There was always a great use case to deploy Unified comms with VDI; it just never worked, €”for example, within a call center environment with the ability to provide a DR solution or allow users to work from home during a snow day.

So, why didn't it work? Quite simply, it was because, when you placed...

Following on from the unified communications support, the next question we hear concerns support for plugging in a USB webcam and using it with a virtual desktop.

The URL Content Redirection feature allows you to configure a URL to either open on a local browser on the endpoint device, or open on the virtual desktop machine. Which content opens in which is configured by use of a GPO.

The use case for doing this is to separate internal browsing from internal browsing. It may be that if you want to look at secure content, then you would use the browser on the virtual desktop machine, as the data doesn't leave the data center and any other browsing can happen locally. Another case may be that you want to limit bandwidth usage into the data center and if users are browsing heavy content they can use their local Internet connection.

There are two types of URL that you can configure for redirection:

In this section, we are going to quickly touch on the Horizon View Client, as it is an important component of the solution and the way you receive your virtual desktop machine's screenshots remotely.

The View Client is basically where your virtual desktop machine's screen is decoded and displayed on an endpoint device. There are two distinct types of View Clients, a software-based version, which is installed on the user's endpoint device, and a hardware-based version, which uses zero clients.

We will cover the View Client options in more detail in Chapter 10, Horizon View Client Options.

In this chapter, we discussed the Horizon View architecture and the different components that make up the complete solution. We covered the key technologies, such as how Linked Clones and Instant Clones work to optimize storage, and then introduced some of the features that go toward delivering a great end-user experience, such as delivering high-end graphics, unified communications, profile management, and how the protocols deliver the desktop to the end user. Now that you understand these features and components, how they work, and how they fit into the overall solution, in the upcoming chapters, we will be taking a deeper look at how to configure them.