September 25, 2019

Getting Started with Horizon Cloud Service

Connecting your existing Horizon 7 pod to the Horizon Service is straightforward if you follow the steps outlined in this blog.

At VMworld, I spoke to a bunch of you who had existing Horizon 7 implementations and wanted to get started with Horizon Service. Just to recap, Horizon Service is a platform built by VMware that takes many of the key components of a VDI / RDS platform and makes them available to you in a cloud-based application offered as a service. It gives you a single place to go to manage multiple Horizon deployments, along with common features and functions like pod deployments, user assignments, image management, monitoring, and helpdesk.

Connecting your existing Horizon 7 pod to the Horizon Service is straightforward if you follow the steps in the picture below:

Connecting Horizon 7 to the Horizon Service

I’ll explain these steps with a little more detail below. There is a lot more technical detail in the Horizon Cloud Service Product Documentation, in the Horizon Cloud Deployment section that covers how to connect your on-premises deployment to the Horizon Service. There, you will find detailed instructions on how to deploy your first on-premises pod to the Horizon Service. You will need to:

  1. Get a Horizon Universal Subscription License – The only way that you can get access to the Horizon Cloud Service is via a subscription license – specifically, the Horizon Universal License. To get ahold of a Horizon Universal license, just reach out to whatever VMware Partner you prefer to work with, or your VMware sales representative. Once you are entitled, you will receive an email from VMware with the details on your login to the Horizon Service and where to get the Horizon 7 Cloud Connector OVA file. You can find more details about the Horizon Universal license by navigating to the Help section of the Horizon Universal License page.

  2. Download a Horizon 7 Cloud Connector – Once you have purchased a Horizon Universal License, you will receive an email from VMware with all the information that you need to download the Horizon 7 Cloud Connector. You can also download the Horizon 7 Cloud Connector via the downloads page by clicking in the Horizon Service Download page on My Downloads. Download the OVF and deploy it to your own Environment. All of the details are outlined in the Horizon Cloud Deployment Guide.

  3. Get a CA signed certificate -  You need a validated digital certificate from a 3rd party Certificate Authority.

  4. Connect Active Directory to Horizon Service – You need Active Directory set up and configured for domain binding, described in the VMware Horizon 7 with VMware Horizon Cloud Service checklist.

Please note that if you are planning on deploying Horizon 7 in VMware Cloud on AWS, many of these items are covered in the VMware Horizon 7 with VMware Horizon Cloud Service checklist.

For more information on deploying the Horizon 7 Cloud Connector, watch this video, which takes you step by step through the technical components of connecting your Horizon 7 environment to Horizon Service.

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