The VMware Horizon 7 product editions

There are four different editions within the Horizon 7 portfolio, each with a different theme, which adds additional functionality and features.

The themes can be categorized as the following:

• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Components (Standard)

• Application Delivery and Management (Advanced + Enterprise)

• Operations Management (Enterprise)

• Infrastructure and Hosting Components (All editions)

The four different editions are described in the following sections.

Horizon for Linux

As the name implies, Horizon for Linux allows you to centralize Linux-based virtual desktop machines, and deliver them with Horizon View. The big advantage of Linux desktops is that you can move away from other, costlier, operating systems, further reducing the cost of deployment.

Horizon for Linux supports a number of Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, RHEL, and CentOS, as well as taking advantage of some of the other features that View has to offer, such as NVIDIA graphics solutions.

Horizon Standard Edition

With Horizon Standard Edition, you have the core VDI solution and all of its features, as well as the ability to deliver session-based desktops. Included in this edition is the licensing for the hosting infrastructure: vSphere and vCenter for desktop. Also included is ThinApp, VMware's application virtualization/packaging solution, which allows you to extract applications from the underlying OS and deliver them back independently.

Horizon Advanced Edition

With Horizon Advanced Edition, the theme is all about application delivery and management. This is the first edition that includes application publishing as part of the View solution, allowing an application running on a Microsoft RDSH backend to be published via the View client using the PCoIP protocol, HTML, or VMware Blast. This feature means that a user can now just have an individual application delivered to their client device rather than on a full-blown desktop.

Also included in the Advanced Edition is a unified workspace solution that provides an application catalog with a brokering functionality. The catalog allows users to select applications from a catalog of entitled applications, which then brokers ThinApp packages, SaaS-based applications, XenApp published applications, and Microsoft Office 365.

The Advanced Edition also includes VMware Mirage, to deliver centralized image management for physical desktops. For a detailed overview of VMware Mirage, you can read VMware Horizon Mirage Essentials, Peter von Oven, Packt.

Horizon Enterprise Edition

Horizon Enterprise Edition builds on the previous two versions and adds features to deliver operations management using vRealize Operations for Horizon. This gives IT admins the ability to monitor the health and performance of the solution, as well as capacity planning capabilities for ensuring the optimum configuration as you scale.

One of the biggest additions to the Enterprise edition is App Volumes, which gives you the ability to deliver just-in-time applications to a virtual desktop. For a detailed overview of VMware App Volumes, you can read Learning VMware App Volumes, Peter von Oven, Packt.

The table in the following screenshot details the features available in each edition:

In this book, we will be covering all of the Horizon 7 editions in some shape or form; however, we will concentrate on the virtual desktop elements of the solution.