Providing Workspace as hosting service

[iceman76]

We are thinking about offering horizon as a hosting service for our customers. In our opinion there is a lot of potential for such a service

The requirements would be

* Integrating with customers Identity service (wil be Active Directory in 99.9%). In some cases th eVMs will have a direct network connection to the customers LAN, in other case there is a Internet Connection only.

* Separating customers, that means separate Workspace vApps for each customer, although the vApp are stored on same datastores

* Has to run within our hosting infrastructure (vSphere with vCloud Director)

Is it possible to deploy the appliances with vCloud Director ? I have doubts that it will work, because there is a very tight integration between Workspace and vCenter.  And if we don't deploy it with vCloud Director (directly from vCenter), is it possible to have multiple instances of Workspace running within one vCenter ?

Any ideas/input is appreciated

[Linjo]

Correct, Horizon Workspace 1.0 can not be deployed with vCloud Director.

You should contact your local VMware Sales-team to get a good understanding on how to provide such a service.

// Linjo

[admin]

Yes you can have multiple installations on vcenter at the same time

About the vCD support, not at the moment as we require a VC extension to be installed.  For the moment, and -beware- for lab purposes only, I created a self-sufficient vCD vApp, called -jargon- vPod.

The vPod contains:

• 1 AD/DNS Windows Server 2008r2
• 1 VCVA 5.1
• 1 virtualized ESXi 5.1 witha a 64GB VMDK as VMFS datastore (thin provisioning later on)
• 1 Windows 7 client
• 1 vCD router VM (vShield) with different pNATs in place to ease access.

The double virtualization layer here is due to the fact that we need a VC extension installed, and in any case Horizon doesn't support vCD. Still, performances are surprisingly satisfactory for the usage this lab is meant to be.