Peter von Oven - Mastering VMware Horizon 8: An Advanced Guide to Delivering Virtual Desktops and Virtual Apps

The global pandemic, a change in how we work and innovate, especially in the cloud, continues to drive change in the world of end-user computing (EUC) and impacts how we deliver digital workspaces.

This book assists those new to VDI and those already familiar with the VMware solutions, providing an up-to-date reference for those organizations and individuals looking at deploying VDI and DaaS.

Peter is a well-known subject matter expert in VMware solutions and has spent many years deploying solutions, educating many through his previous books, and contributing much to the EUC community. This latest book provides an informative update in the fast-paced world of EUC.

The VMware Horizon solution is the foundation for delivering the digital workspace. The term virtual desktop infrastructure, or VDI, was coined back in 2002, where end users simply connected, on a one-to-one basis, to a desktop operating system that was running as a virtual machine on a hypervisor on servers in the data center. Wind the clock forward to today, and although the basic principle remains the same, the technology behind the scenes to deliver a desktop or app experience has advanced massively.

This book will focus on how to get started with VMware Horizon and how to deliver virtual desktop machines and RDSH-based applications and desktop sessions to end users. Throughout this book, we will work through the solution to enable you to design, install, configure, and manage a Horizon deployment, using step-by-step instructions with real-life screenshots as you follow the test lab that is used throughout the book to demonstrate each key feature.

Starting with a high-level overview of remote desktop solutions, followed by an introduction into VDI specifically, this book will then provide an in-depth overview of VMware Horizon and where the solution fits within the market, and its key features. We will then move on to explaining the architecture and components and then look at how to design an optimized solution.

Once you have understood the architecture, the next step is to start installing and configuring Horizon, including best practices for building your virtual desktop gold image and optimizing it in order to deliver the best end-user experience possible.

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/978-1-4842-7260-2. For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code.