VMware Horizon Cloud on AWS

VMware Horizon Cloud on AWS brochure

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The Challenge

Recent events have dramatically elevated the priority for public sector organizations to support flexible remote work strategies. Organizations without remote work policies in place are struggling to deploy the right technology infrastructure and solutions that are scalable and allow workers to remain productive in supporting daily operations.

While speed and flexibility are important considerations, public sector organizations must also ensure security beyond the firewall. That's because remote workers have access to internal resources and data on laptops, tablets and bring-your-own (BYOD) devices. Additionally, organizations are striving to ensure their technology investments can solve today's remote work needs and serve as a foundation for future infrastructure modernization and digital transformation.

WWT is uniquely positioned to help organizations solve these near-term challenges while providing the technology foundation for future digital transformation efforts:

Reduce costs and improve security instead of issuing laptops to remote workers. Enable the ability to securely work from any device using the Horizon client or any HTML5 browser while adding the ability to locate the virtual desktops closer to the end users.

Eliminate costly redundant datacenter and infrastructure capacity by shifting to the cloud. Pay for only a small constant capacity to maintain infrastructure-related services and gain the ability to quickly ramp-up with a pay-as-you-go model for the additional capacity when needed.

Add the ability to burst to additional capacity in the cloud without having to purchase or maintain excess hardware infrastructure for an on-prem Horizon environment and scale down in periods of lower demand. Improve the remote end user experience as cloud-hosted virtual desktops typically will have lower latency connections to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications.

The WWT solution

Supporting virtual desktops and applications in the cloud is commonly known as Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) – a term that comprises many choices with a variety of specific benefits and costs. For some organizations, the most prudent option is to have their public clouds integrate and work seamlessly with their on-premises infrastructure. This approach, a hybrid-cloud deployment, leverages an organization's existing capabilities of existing teams, skillsets, tools and processes.

Combined, VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS and VMware Horizon can support virtual desktops and applications with a common management interface across both private and public clouds while providing seamless access to end users:

VMC on AWS allows vSphere Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDC) running in AWS and on-premises to be connected and managed from a single VMware vSphere interface. Using a connected AWS account, customers can access AWS services such as EC2 and S3from virtual machines in their SDDC.
With VMware Horizon, organizations can deploy the same environment in the on-premises and the AWS SDDCs and connect them with Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA) for both federated management and seamless access for the end users.

Cross-functional expertise

WWT experts have extensive End User Computing (EUC) and Cloud expertise. Through in-depth workshops, they share their experiences and best practices to help organizations reach the best decisions faster. Using WWT's Advanced Technology Center (ATC), our experts can demonstrate the pre-built integration labs we created to help accelerate your evaluations.

VMC on AWS and Horizon with CPA also can be used solely within AWS to expand between SDDCs and regions for scale and resiliency in a pure cloud model, as shown in Figure 1.

Quickstarts

WWT has designed a Quickstart engagement methodology to help customers rapidly architect and implement a cloud-based virtual desktop environment designed with best practices to enable their business requirements. WWT offers Quickstart engagements for customers anywhere on the Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) journey to help them quickly get deployed and continue operations:

Cloud Foundation Quickstart — For customers without an existing AWS Account.
VMC on AWS Quickstart — Available upon request for customers who need a hybrid cloud solution rapidly deployed and configured.
VMware Horizon on AWS Quickstart — For customers with an existing VMC on AWS SDDC-Add-on for CPA integration with an on-premises Horizon environment.
If a Quickstart does not meet your specific needs, WWT's Account Team and Solution Architects can create customized deployments for complex, sizable or highly secure environments.

In addition to the Quickstart or custom engagements for deployment of VMware Cloud on AWS and Horizon, the following subscriptions will be required and included in any design. WWT can help customers choose the right one, facilitate purchase, and set up any required subscription not present in their environment today.