Omnissa announces Limited Availability for Horizon 8 with VCD

Omnissa is excited to announce Horizon 8 Limited Availability (LA) for use on VCD as a managed capacity. You can now automatically provision and manage the lifecycle of VMs from within a VCD tenant.   This release is based on a special branch of the 2406 release of Horizon 8.  The Limited Availability release allows you to deploy Horizon 8 on vCloud Director for a single VCD tenant's use.  This article assumes you are familiar with VCD.  You can find the VCD documentation here:  Cloud Director Documentation. 

Who needs VCD for Horizon 8?

Cloud Director, also referred to as VCD, is a cloud services platform that delivers secure, isolated, and elastic virtual data center compute, network, storage, and security in a self-service model. VCD obtains its resources from an underlying virtual infrastructure. After you register vSphere resources in Cloud Director, you can allocate these resources for organizations to use. 

Within Cloud Director, Tenants are defined as different customers of a cloud service provider.   In the case where VCD is operated by a single corporation or other type of organizational entity for internal use, tenants may refer to internal groups within that organization that require complete separation of datacenter resources even on shared hardware.

Cloud Director allows large organizations and cloud operators to easily partition their vSphere resources amongst Tenants. Each tenant can be entitled with role based administrative access to the resources defined within the Tenant.   This simplifies administration for both tenant provider and tenant. By creating a virtual data center, each tenant can be managed securely and independently from other tenants in the environment.   Any application installed into a single tenant is only available to that tenant for access.   Furthermore, tenants with sufficient role access can easily install and maintain horizon on their own inside their tenant.   

Horizon 8 for VCD is an integration primarily designed for Sovereign Cloud Providers (SCP) and Cloud Services Providers (CSP) who own or plan to deploy a Cloud Director infrastructure, sell tenants to their customers, and want to offer a Horizon 8 VDI option to those customers.

Horizon 8 on VCD is also available directly to Omnissa customers who either operate their own internal VCD deployment or who already have or plan to have a VCD tenant with a SCP or CSP and prefer to deploy Horizon 8 into that tenant.

How does the integration work?

Deploying Horizon 8 on VCD is a straightforward process, like previous versions of Horizon. If you already have VCD provisioned or preconfigured desktop images ready to use in your datacenter, only minimal configuration changes need to be made, making integrating Horizon into VCD natively that much more convenient.

The CSP can now install Horizon in an organization's VCD tenant.  The deployed Horizon 8 instance is used to automatically provision various types of desktops: Full Clone, Fast Clone, Persistent and Non-Persistent, and both Windows 10 and Windows 11 desktops. 

The figure above illustrates a Cloud Director tenant with four providers.  Each provider is its own Virtual Data Center.  One Infrastructure provider is where the Horizon pod components are installed, one provider leverages hardware optimized for VDI where Horizon can provision automatically provision VDI desktops, and two additional providers illustrating different hardware profiles for GPU desktops and RDSH published apps.

Note: GPU and RDSH based workloads are currently brokered to via manual pools.  

Provisioning workloads with Horizon 8 on VCD

As a part of the integration, vCloud Director is available as a capacity type in the Horizon 8 Console.  The process of provisioning desktop pools and user entitlements in the Horizon 8 UI does not change.  The ability to select your VCD tenant organization as a Provider has been added.  This eliminates any need to directly access vCenter for pool configuration. See the added UI elements highlighted below. 

How to get started

To participate in the Limited Availability integration of vCloud Director and Horizon 8, send an email to Omnissa at GetHorizonOnVCDLA@omnissa.com.

The LA release currently supports Horizon 8 2406 (Limited Availability) and Cloud Director 10.5.x.  Once you join the Limited Availability program, we will provide access to the product documentation, and the relevant installation files necessary for the integration to work properly., including a prerequisites checklist and deployment guide.