While many organizations have been for the last number of years considering cloud-based and as-a-service desktop models, the emergence of the recent global pandemic has hastened the requirement to provide secure desktops with external access quickly. As the old phrase goes "Haste makes waste", customers often get stuck up trying to tackle everything upfront: POCs, pilots, architecture and security reviews, etc when the first question should be:
Are my applications cloud-ready?.
Windows applications were often developed assuming the client and backend servers and middleware were on the same network or at least separated by low latency connections. How will shifting the desktop, and therefore the applications, to a public cloud impact the performance of the applications? There's little value to a 10-second desktop login if it takes 15 minutes for an application to load, and 3 minutes to react to every interaction. While there some exaggeration in this statement, there is an element of reality. If the applications do not work or perform why test everything else?
My suggestion is to validate the application use-cases first before tackling the rest of the time-consuming tasks, by following a 3 step process.
Step 1: Build a desktop in the cloud with your applications. No Horizon, no protocols, a vanilla desktop There are a couple of goals here:
Do the applications work.
How do they perform*?
Are the results good enough*?
* It could be useful to try measure the performance and compare to "known good" performance of an on-premises
,** Good enough is highly objective. This could be use-case dependent, for example, if this is for urgent work-from-home scenarios, a degraded performance may be an acceptable trade-off for the business.
Step 2: The applications work and performance is tolerable. Test the protocol.
VMware Horizon is 2 things:
a. A management service to orchestrate, entitle and broker access to automated pools of desktops and applications.
b. A client-agent service to present the desktop and applications over a display protocol, delivering an end-user experience.
While both are intrinsically linked they are often conflated when it comes to testing. The user experience can be examined in isolation by using a frequently overlooked feature available to the Horizon agent: the Direct-Connection Plug-in. This tool adds an extension on to the Horizon agent to allow a client to authenticate and connect directly to a desktop without the requirement for the Horizon management layer. In addition to the direct-connection plug-in, make sure the Horizon Performance Tracker item is installed alongside the Horizon agent.
To test the Horizon Agent Direct-Connect plug-in, I’ve written a step-by-step guide here:
Step 3: Layer in the management items.
The applications work! The protocol works! Now validate all the management items.
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