Hello, welcome to the digital workspace Tech Zone Expert Series, where we're going to learn from top technical experts about the latest digital
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Workspace technologies from VMware. Today we're talking to Josh Spencer, and
today we're going to talk about VMware Horizon Apps.
So Josh, I'm going to start with the obvious question, what is Horizon Apps? Horizon Apps is a technology that allows users to get access to published applications and is part of our broader Horizon Suite that
really lets our end users get access to the published applications, web-based applications, as well as mobile apps.
And that's really the VMware Workspace ONE? That's exactly right.
So OK, Horizon Apps. We've had Horizon for a long time, to get VDI desktops. Is this something different than Horizon, or is this part of the that?
It's really nothing different under the hood. It's Horizon, right? So the same engine, all the same power of the client, and we'll talk about more of that as we go today.
But from a EULA perspective, we're essential restricting it down to RDSH published applications, rather than VDI. Oh, so if I don't think I'm going to use
VDI desktops, I don't worry about VDI desktops, I can just get Horizon Apps and focus on the published applications? Exactly. Great!
So you say it's basically the same code base as Horizon. Can I get the same user experience with Apps as I can with VDI desktops?
Yeah, so one of the great things that VMware Engineering does is break out the client/agent from the underlying management components. So from an end-user perspective,
all of the goodness that comes from the client side, the variety of endpoint devices we can use, the accelerated 3-D graphics, the MMR
redirection, and all that goodness -- Skype for Business, etc. - of all comes from the client and the agent capabilities and that is exactly the same
across the stack. Under the hood, when we start talking about provisioning, whether its an RDSH form or
desktops in the VDI world, the same provisioning engine and all that kind of thing. So we really provide a lot of benefit to both the end users, as well as IT on the same platform.
So as we add new technologies, we're really doing a lot of that through the client and agent? That's exactly right. We come out with a pretty aggressive
release cadence there, once a quarter. New features, new enhancements, new improvements to the protocol, etc., through that client/agent release.
OK, when I think about all those applications, I think about RDS hosts and I thinnk about the complexity of managing those, I think about silos, I think
about maintenance, and patches, and all that sort of thing, is there anything that Horizon Apps brings to that, that could help with that process?
Yeah, you're giving me a headache, just thinking back on managing all of that stuff. So absolutely. It's one of the key things that we bring to the table, is, for the IT benefits side,
we have a technology called Instant Clones. Instant clones work for VDI desktops, but in Horizon Apps, again, it works great for the
RDSH farms that we provision. So by creating a single generic image, we can provision tens or hundreds of
RDSH farms in just a matter of minutes and by leveraging our maintenance capabilities, we can go through and very quickly change out that underlying
base image, and refresh the entire farm, again, in a matter of minutes. So, does that cause a lot of down time for my users? No, in fact, by configuring the farm
accordingly, we can ensure that there's always some number of hosts and are up and available during one of these operations, so that for our
customers that have 365, and 24/7-type operations, healthcare, etc., we can actually make sure we are only updating a certain portion at a time,
and keeping essentially a rolling maintenance schedule. Great, and you mentioned that that can be scheduled on a recurring basis. What if I run into a situation where I've got a critical patche,
I've got a big virus moving across the world, try to get ahead of that, maybe there is a patch available for that, can I do a just-in-time maintenance on my farm?
Ueah, for sure. So we talked a little about the recurring operation. One of the other operations you can use for maintenance is an immediate operation. And the idea there is
we can go through, again, update the base image, we can do it out-of-band so we have no impact on the farm itself, and then go through and schedule that maintenance operation,
a one-time operation, to happen right now. Then we point everybody to the new snapshot,
have everybody go through, and again, it will happen on that rolling cycle, so we don't take all of the host down at once, but
it's going to happen very quickly, and we can even control things like whether or not end users are pushed out of their sessions.
Great. So we've been talking about the farms and about maintaining the farms. Do you have any recommended best practices for how we would deploy applications out to those RDSH farms?
Yes, so we really have a couple of different options for getting applications out there. If you look back a ways, from the traditional
clones, we had Linked Clones, and in those scenarios, technology like VMware App Volumes allows us to abstract the
applications away from the underlying OS, and deliver them dynamically. So, again, imagine a large enterprise customer with many, many farms,
servicing many different lines of business, we can bundle applications together in AppStacks, and deliver those out
to different farms dynaimcally. So we can provision 100 virtual machines, they are all identical,
this AppStack containing these 20 applications gets delivered, and instantly, all of those hosts come up with the appropriate set of applications. So, you mention App Volumes. That's part
of the Just-In-Time Management Platform (JMP), right? So we've got instant clones for the RDSH servers, and we have App Volumes. Is there
anything else about that, that would come into play for managing those applications?
Yes, as we move past technologies like linked clones, and into things like instant clones, we can now provision, and actually update these
instant-clone farms, so quickly that in some cases customers--especially if they are not down the path of App Volumes yet-- they may choose to
actually just update the base image and push that across the board. Really I think the thing to take away here is that we provide a lot of flexibility and whether you're interested
in App Volumes for the application lifecycle management that it provides, or if you have some
sort of lifecycle management that you do with your individual images,
we can accommodate both of those, using Horizon Apps. OK. I sort of brought up the Just-In-Time Management platform, so the three pieces
of that are instant clones, which we talked about, App Volumes, which we talked about. And so VMware User Environment Manager is another piece of that. Can you
talk about how that applies to Horizon App> So User Environment Manager actually has a pretty broad range of offerings. We can do application
personalization, and we'll talk more about that in a moment. We can provide things like application privilege elevation
and application blocking and a number of different things. But let's focus on the personalization for a moment. I think it's a real sweet spot for Horizon Apps.
Traditionally when you log into a shared environment, by design, we're going to limit what people can do, right? By design, a number of folks are all connected to the same share instance,
which means if we make any significant changes, we're going to affect one another. So people will typically very much restrict what you can
do when you're accessing an RDS session. With User Environment Manager,
we remove that restriction by tracking your individual changes and mine, etc., and applying those in real time. So I log in to an RDS instance that's completely generic,
but I can get the application configured the way that I want, the way that I left it, you do as well, and everyone else.
Awesome, so we talked a little bit about the User Environment Manager generically. One of the things we use in the Horizon world is Horizon Smart
Policies, Can I use Horizon Smart Policies within individual apps, as well as with VDI desktops? For sure. And so does the smart policies are
essentially a predefined set of policies that apply to the Horizon world. So things like bandwidth profiles for Blast or PCoIP, being
able to control the behavior for USB direction, printer redirection, and things like that. So for a smart policy,
we can actually use various conditions to customize the environment even further. Say I am a Horizon administrator who has been doing VDI for a
long time. So I have full Horizon. We talk about Horizon Apps as being kind of its own thing, it's still Horizon but I can buy it just Apps, but I'm
assuming that if I own Horizon VDI, get Horizon Apps, how would that potentially fit into my
environment? So you buy or bundle these things together. IT is going to have the flexibility to provide either simply applications, so folks that just
need an app or two can be provided through Horizon Apps. If the end user has a more demanding application that requires a full-on VDI experience, we can provision that to them.
All of this is done through the Horizon Console, a single interface for provision applications, provision desktops, it really doesn't matter.
Taking that a step further, end users can actually combine these things. so maybe most of the time, I use published applications from my MacBook and that's
how I gain access. But on occasion, I need access to a full-on VDI desktop for some specialized application.
I can connect to the VDI desktop, work as normal, and then from there, actually run publishing applications from Horizon, inside
that VDI desktop. So it really doesn't matter. We're giving this very seamless and very consistent way to access your applications and desktops, using a single client across the board,
any type of endpoint device. So it gives me a lot of flexibility as a Horizon Administrator for how I can do that. Maybe
is possible, as I'm onboarding new apps, instead of putting them as part of my VDI arrangement, I just publish them as apps and then offer them up to people who are using VDI like you described.
Right. Makes good sense to me. Well, Josh, I appreciate your talking to us about VMware Horizon Apps. I've got one final question for you. If I want to learn more than we covered here in this
few minutes, if I want to dig deeper into Horizon Apps, some suggested resources that people can go to to get that information?
Yes. We've got some great information on VMware.Com. The VMware EUC Blog is always full of lots of good information. If you can't find it in a white paper format, RAs, etc., that we have
on the website, definitely go out and take a look at the Hands-On Labs. VMware Hands-On Labs are a
great resource to get and try this technology hands-on and get familiarity with it and find out how great it is. Thanks for taking the time today, we appreciate it.
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