Hot of the press from the EUC Champion group is the announcement of Horizon on VMware Cloud on AWS, a bit of a mouthful but its basically adding Horizon to the already available VMware Cloud on AWS. Currently in tech preview, it is not quite Desktop as a Service though, VMware will manage the underlying SDDC infrastructure provided by VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). Customers will still need to manage Horizon Infrastructure along with the desktops and applications.

In grey is what is managed by the provide, what is in colour is what is managed by the customer.

I speak to customers all the time about VDI and while the concept is widely viewed as beneficial, delivering those visions can sometimes prove difficult. To run Horizon on-premises involves a lot of sizing and planning, especially when we include multiple datacentres. To be able to offer this in AWS is very appealing, the main use cases I can see will be around that DR piece and to be able to offer standby desktops in the event of a DR.

There may also be a requirement for application locality, if some key application servers have been migrated to VMware Cloud on AWS then it could be beneficial to run the desktops close to the application.

It will leverage Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA) to provide interpod communication between sites, whether thats on-premises or in AWS. By leveraging CPA, Horizon can be easily extended on a pay as you go basis.

Reminder this is in tech preview, more to follow