VMware Horizon 8: Skills for Virtual Desktop Management

This three-day, hands-on course gives you the skills to deliver virtual desktops and applications through a single virtual desktop infrastructure platform. This course builds your skills in configuring and managing VMware Horizon® 8 through a combination of lecture and hands-on labs. You learn how to configure and deploy pools of virtual machines and how to provide a customized desktop environment to end-users.

Who Can Benefit

• Operators, administrators, and architects for VMware Horizon should enroll in this course. These individuals are responsible for the creation, maintenance, and or delivery of remote and virtual desktop services.

Skills Gained

• By the end of the course, you should be able to meet the following objectives:
• Recognize the features and benefits of Horizon
• Use VMware vSphere® to create VMs to be used as desktops for Horizon
• Create and optimize Windows VMs to create Horizon desktops
• Install and configure Horizon Agent on Horizon desktop
• Configure and manage the VMware Horizon® Client™ systems and connect the client to a VMware Horizon desktop
• Configure, manage, and entitle desktop pools of full VMs
• Configure, manage, and entitle pools of instant-clone desktops
• Create and use Remote Desktop Services (RDS) desktops and application pools
• Monitor the Horizon environment using Horizon Console Dashboard and Horizon Help Desk Tool

Prerequisites

• Customers attending this course should have, at a minimum, the following VMware infrastructure skills:
• Use VMware vSphere® Web Client to view the state of virtual machines, datastores, and networks
• Open a virtual machine console on VMware vCenter Server® and access the guest operating system

Course Content

Outline

• Course Introduction
• Introductions and course logistics
• Course objectives

• Introduction to VMware Horizon
• Recognize the features and benefits of Horizon
• Describe the conceptual and logical architecture of Horizon

• Introduction to Use Case
• Define a use case for your virtual desktop and application infrastructure
• Convert customer requirements to use-case attributes

• vSphere for Horizon 8
• Explain basic virtualization concepts
• Use VMware vSphere® Client™ to access your vCenter Server system and VMware ESXi™ hosts
• Create, provision, and remove a virtual machine

• VMware Horizon Desktops
• Create a Windows and a Linux virtual machine using vSphere
• Optimize and prepare Windows and Linux virtual machines to set up Horizon desktop VMs

• VMware Horizon Agents
• Outline the configuration choices when installing Horizon Agent on Windows and Linux virtual machines
• Create a gold master for Windows Horizon desktops

• VMware Horizon Pools
• Identify the steps to set up a template for desktop pool deployment
• List the steps to add desktops to the VMware Horizon® Connection Server™ inventory
• Compare dedicated-assignment and floating-assignment pools
• Outline the steps to create an automated pool
• Define user entitlement
• Explain the hierarchy of global, pool-level, and user-level policies

• VMware Horizon Client Options
• Describe the different clients and their benefits
• Access Horizon desktop using various Horizon clients and HTML
• Configure integrated printing, USB redirection, and the shared folders option
• Configure session collaboration and media optimization for Microsoft Teams

• Creating and Managing Instant-Clone Desktop Pools
• List the advantages of instant clones
• Explain the provisioning technology used for instant clone desktop pools
• Set up an automated pool of instant clones
• Push updated images to instant clone desktop pools

• Creating RDS Desktop and Application Pools
• Explain the difference between an RDS desktop pool and an automated pool
• Compare and contrast an RDS session host pool, a farm, and an application pool
• Create an RDS desktop pool and an application pool
• Access RDS desktops and application from Horizon Client
• Use the instant clone technology to automate the build-out of RDSH farms
• Configure load-balancing for RDSHs on a farm

• Monitoring VMware Horizon
• Monitor the status of the Horizon components using the Horizon Administrator console dashboard
• Monitor desktop sessions using the HelpDesk tool