VMware Horizon Cloud Integration with Microsoft Azure

Posted on 16 May 2017 by Ray Heffer

Today VMware has publicly announced the integration of Horizon Cloud with Microsoft Azure. As you may know, Horizon Cloud is available in two deployment models today; on-premises or cloud hosted. On-premises deployments take advantage of what was formely known as Project Enzo, where hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) can be deployed in your own data centers, but leveraging the cloud control plane which is managed by VMware and hosted with IBM SoftLayer. The other option is to deploy desktops to a fully managed Horizon Cloud where you don’t need to host any infrastructure of your own in order to manage the virtual desktops or applications.

Available in the second half of 2017, we will now have the option to host desktops with Azure. This is another leap for VMware’s cross-cloud strategy, and it allows customers to take advantage of Microsofts massive data center footprint. This also means customers can split their deployments between on-premises and the public cloud.

I have been fortunate enough to have been working closely with our EUC R&D team and spent some time with them to understand the key components and architecture behind this new announcement. I am sure in the coming months we’ll be releasing more information, and stay tuned for VMworld!