VMware Horizon design overview

The primary focus of this book is to show you how to deploy and configure VMware Horizon. Ultimately, the deployment is only one part of a successful Horizon implementation. Determining the infrastructure requirements of your virtual desktops is critical to ensuring that all your hard work implementing Horizon won't ultimately be a disappointment because you failed to consider what your desktops actually need.

Some organizations that are virtualizing older desktops that lack flash drives, may feel that meeting their users' needs will be easy because expectations are low from the start. Of course, some organizations tend to forget that their users are probably using flash-based devices at home. This means that even with a poor computing experience at work, these users will have some expectation of what it is like when they get a new computer, which is what their new Horizon desktop will appear to be. So, even if your Horizon infrastructure is capable of providing performance that is similar to the computers that users have today, that does not mean it will provide an experience that the users will find acceptable.

The goal of this section is to provide some information that you need to consider before you buy your Horizon licenses. Buying those licenses is the easy part, assembling the infrastructure they will be built on, is not. Unfortunately, it isn't possible to put into words everything you need to know in order to build an infrastructure that guarantees a good performance for your users. Therefore, I have suggested a detailed analysis of the network and storage infrastructure that you intend to use with your Horizon infrastructure. This analysis, combined with an understanding of the resources your Horizon infrastructure will require, is integral to delivering a superior end user experience.