Modern VDI for the Hybrid Cloud with Dell EMC and VMware Horizon 8

The way we work is rapidly changing, and organizations around the world have responded quickly to the challenge. In order to move fast to meet end user access requirements and demands, organizations have taken advantage of desktop and application virtualization, deploying on-premises and in the cloud. Businesses want to take full advantage of a hybrid cloud Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution for the rich features and manageability of on-premises deployment and the immediate availability and scale with public cloud. However, the hybrid cloud VDI architecture needs careful consideration – such as the locality and security of desktops, apps, and data are relative to end users and whether their current on-premises environment supports easy VDI workflow migration to public clouds. In addition, deploying and managing desktops and apps in multiple clouds and locations can produce management overhead.

What if you could deploy desktops and apps on both private and public cloud, to provide the best experience for your end user at the best cost profile, with one management system? Tolday, we are pleased to announce the availability of Horizon 8 with the Dell Technologies Ready Solutions for VDI.

Top 3 Challenges of Hybrid Cloud VDI Deployment:

1. Inconsistent deployment of VDI – Organizations with an on-premises VDI solution need to quickly scale capacity to the public cloud when needed. The reverse is also true: organizations with a cloud VDI deployment may need to move some workloads back on-premises. This requires different SLAs, different images, different cost structure, different location of virtual desktops and apps and potentially a different user experience. Scaling and moving VDI environments across different deployment models can be slow and difficult to execute.

2. Inconsistent end-user experience – With VDI environments being deployed across clouds, employees often experience inconsistent load time, high latency, and poor application performance with their virtual desktops. This drastically reduces employee productivity and job satisfaction, negatively impacting business outcomes.

3. Complex Management – Deploying desktops and apps on-premises and in the cloud often comes with multiple management platforms. It can be hard to gain real-time visibility to resolve issues quickly, can significantly increase security exposure, and a multitude of expertise is required for each management system.

A Simple Solution – VDI Made for Hybrid Cloud:

To help organizations take full advantage of a hybrid cloud VDI solution while avoiding any downsides, VMware launched Horizon 8 with new and improved features that help quickly and flexibly scale your VDI environment across clouds. Together, Dell EMC and VMware create a one-stop, end-to-end solution that’s a simple path to a hybrid cloud VDI strategy.

◉ Scale to any cloud with flexible VDI deployment models – Customers can freely choose where to deploy their VDI environments with Dell EMC and VMware solutions. For customers who want to refresh their on-premises VDI environment or bring some workloads back to on-premises from the cloud, we encourage them to rethink their data center structure and consider VMware Horizon on Dell Technologies Cloud Platform (DTCP). VMware Horizon on DTCP is built on Dell EMC VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) with VMWare Cloud Foundation (VCF), delivering simple operations through automation across the VDI and app stack. Customers can deploy and configure virtual desktops at lightning speed through native integrations across Dell VxRail, VMware SDDC, and Horizon virtual desktops and apps, with built-in security from the hardware layer to the end-user virtual desktops.

For customers who plan to scale their VDI environment from the on-premises data center to the cloud, Horizon on DTCP provides an easy and fast way to extend the capability to public clouds. Horizon 8 expanded the number of new cloud platforms support for native VMware stack, including support for Horizon on VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. These extensive cloud deployment options truly enable a hybrid model so IT can take advantage of cloud resources where they need to.

◉ Enable a delightful end-user experience – A new universal brokering solution available with Horizon 8 helps federate brokering across multiple clouds. This cloud brokering service automatically connects end-users to their personal desktop in any pod on-premises or in the public cloud, globally, resulting in low latency and high-quality connection regardless of the user location.

Instant Clone Smart Provisioning technology in Horizon 8 can rapidly provision full-featured, personalized virtual desktops and apps, instantly delivering a persistent desktop that satisfies the user’s specific needs. There are also improvements made to optimize audio and video support for Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and other communication and collaboration tools, providing a better user experience to improve productivity. ​

◉ Manage silos with a single console – With Horizon 8, IT can take advantage of a single control plane to efficiently deploy, manage, and scale desktops and apps, across private and public clouds, and across Horizon pods. For example, IT can utilize a common set of tools and a unified architecture to seamlessly and smoothly migrate on-premises VDI workloads to VMware environments in the public clouds. This allows IT to provision additional capacities such as launching hundreds of virtual desktops in a short time or enabling disaster recovery (DR) by having an on-premises active primary site and a secondary passive site in the public cloud.

New Restful APIs help automate rich capabilities available in Horizon, including monitoring, entitlements, and user and machine management. IT can easily interact with Horizon for added flexibility, distributing and accessing information, and modernizing services with speed.

Dell EMC and VMware provide a turnkey, end-to-end VDI solution that is easy to buy and quick to deploy to any cloud.

Source: dellemc.com