VMware Horizon View vs VMware Player comparison

VMware Horizon View is a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution that helps organizations to provide virtual machines and applications to end-users that can be run on a variety of devices. With Horizon View, organizations are able to provide remote access to desktops, improve their security and compliance, and significantly reduce the costs and complexities of physical hardware management.

Horizon View has an intuitive central management area for all virtual devices, which enables image creation and management, management of users, and access control. Horizon View users have the flexibility that allows them to access their virtual desktops and applications from any type of device and from any location.

The solution has enhanced security abilities, including built-in encryption and secure communication between the devices and the virtual machines. These security measures help ensure the safety of sensitive data, even if the data is accessed from a non-secure device.

Benefits of VMware Horizon View

VMware Horizon View provides its users with several key benefits, including:

• Enhanced security: VMware Horizon View’s virtual desktops are run from a secure data center, which reduces the risk of data loss or attacks.

• High performance: Experience high levels of performance and stability, even with low-bandwidth connections.

• Flexibility: Horizon View virtual machines can run on a wide range of devices, including laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Users are able to access their virtual desktops from any location.

• Centralized management: Create and manage all of your virtual desktops from a single location.

• Scalability: Scale your virtual machines up and down depending on your usage.

• Reduced costs: Eliminate the usage of physical desktops and reduce hardware, maintenance, and energy costs.

• Simple deployments: Horizon View automates the deployment and configuration of virtual desktops, making it faster and easier to roll out virtual desktops to users.

VMware Horizon View features

Some of Horizon View’s top features include:

• Load balancing: Improve performance and stability by balancing workloads across multiple servers.

• User management and access control: Create and manage user profiles, including their saved data and settings across virtual desktops. Control user access to virtual desktops based on multiple factors.

• Multimedia optimization: Improve the performance of your applications that use audio and video by optimizing multimedia playback for virtual desktops.

• Virtual application and machine sharing: Create and share pools of virtual desktops and applications between users, making them easy to maintain and manage.

• Customizations: Enables IT to customize the user environment, including the desktop background, shortcuts, and start menu, to meet the needs of different users or departments.

Reviews from Real Users

VMware Horizon View stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its flexibility, powerful performance, and virtualizing capabilities.

David G., a systems engineer at a tech services company, writes, “This product is great for desktop management. It enables you to update one golden image, save it and basically deploy it... It makes management a lot easier. There's also the huge savings. We've (used) it with the pandemic because everybody had to work from home. Even if there weren't enough laptops to go around, almost everybody has a home computer. It was just a matter of installing Horizon on your home computer and connecting to the office using two-factor authentication. They made it really simple.”

VMware Player, or VMware Player Plus, is described by VMware as the easiest way to run a virtual machine on Windows or Linux PCs in a commercial environment. If you want to deliver a managed desktop to your employees, customers, students, contractors, or partners, then this virtual desktop solution is the way to go.

VMware Player provides the most advanced virtualization platform available, which is capable of supporting even extremely demanding applications. Even though the platform is so advanced, the user interface is simple and easy-to-use.

There is seamless integration with Windows XP and Windows XP applications even if the machine itself is a Windows 7 PC, a Windows 8 PC, or even Linux-based. It also gives your IT person the capability of restricting the virtual machines by requiring runtime passwords, adding an expiration date, blocking USB devices, or encrypting the machines. By using VMware vCenter Converter, VMware Player can even convert old machines into virtual machines without you needing to re-configure or re-install any applications.