This year at VMworld, myself and my colleague Aresh Sarkari had the opportunity to talk about a project we’ve been working on for the past few years. We’ve been re-redesigning and deploying VMware’s internal Horizon Desktop environments.

Session Summary

“How does VMware architect its own global VMware Horizon desktop environment?” “Has it encountered the same obstacles we are facing?” Over the past two years, VMware has been re-architecting and deploying its virtual desktop infrastructure with VMware Horizon, VMware App Volumes, and VMware User Environment Manager running on top of the full VMware software-defined data center stack (VMware vSphere, VMware vSAN, VMware NSX) and integrating with VMware vRealize Operations Manager and VMware vRealize Log Insight. In this session, the lead architects will reveal all.

Our session (ADV1255BU – The Secret Sauce Behind VMware’s Internal VMware Horizon Desktop) includes the following sections:

• Where we we? – Why did we need to kick off this project (from the beginning)
• What do we need? – Revisiting the business and technical requirements (from 3:05)
• How do we do this better? – How do we design this new infrastructure making sure we don’t hit the same issues again (from 5:13)
• Where we are today? – A look at what we architected and deployed  (from 9:12)
• What did we learn? – What challenges did we face along the way (from 30:45)
• Where do we go from here? – How can we improve upon what we have built (from 41:51)

I hope you enjoy it and find it useful. Please contact myself or Aresh if you have any questions around our session.