Has anyone leveraged Horizon DaaS? If so, what has been the experience so far?

Used to be on one of the partner teams that covered partners deploying DaaS. What do you want to know about?

I have a customer that wants to evaluate it.

It’s a partner-only product, and AFAIK, it’s not for sale anymore.

LOL!!!

What’s the use case?

They have an on prem foot print with off shore contractors. The on prem team that supports Horizon is thin. Looking to off load some of the mundane work the on prem team has to handle.

I've used in in the past, it's not worth it (IMO).

You could explore Horizon Accelerator, that team can manage the day to day. https://www.omnissa.com/products/horizon-accelerator/

Horizon DaaS is on it's way out... You may be looking at Horizon Cloud if you want to leverage Azure as a platform.

Yeah, what Rob has here. Gen1 is EOL/out the door and new stuff is the 'next-gen' cloud with the Universal SKU that we are focused on

@Tim Cremer - what do they consider "mundane" work in this case?

Troubleshooting desktop issues and image creation. They want their engineers focused on big picture items that will move the business forward from a technology perspective

I hope they also have a look at application management now that they go the Horizon route. With App volumes they can leverage life cycle management for applications, and on-demand delivery. the instant patching of apps + pushing them through a TAP process is, I think, a very nice functionality to have. (you want your apps to be patched asap and not when you do image management)

So...if I'm being honest...moving to Horizon Cloud will not remove that mundane work. Desktop image management and troubleshooting issues is still a customer responsibility on that platform. Omnissa only manages the Horizon components.

MSP services have challenges as well, most often at the cost side as the line with what is included in the package and what not can be blurry.. we've seen that with the outsourcing of support as well, they support everything until they don't

Or can't. Or Won't

more often won't until you pay extra

@Tim Cremer If you want end-to-end management, you need a service provider like Dizzion who specialize in fully-managed Desktop-as-a-Service. Going to Horizon Cloud or even platforms like Nerdio or AVD will not completely offload desktop image management and troubleshooting because the "as-a-service" part only refers to the infrastructure portion...just like using Azure VM or EC2 IAAS doesn't remove management of the actual workload.

Thank you so much for the feedback. You both made some great points. Myself and two other engineers are responsible for upgrading and laying the ground work for a transition to Horizon on Azure. I agree with both of you in regards to the long term strategy of off loading management to an outsourcing vendor. I am sure those conversations will take place after we are rolled off the project.