January 15, 2026
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Riley Bui
Product Marketing Manager
Riley Bui is a Product Marketing Manager at Omnissa. She enjoys collaborating with cross-functional teams and creating content, whether it’s writing blogs or making videos. Her outside interests are climbing, playing pickleball, and traveling.
Looking for a way to modernize virtual desktop and app delivery while keeping your vSphere workloads on-premises? Many organizations want the flexibility of choice to offload infrastructure management without sacrificing control. Customers and service providers are seeking faster time to value when deploying VDI on vSphere, along with the ability to mix and match VDI across private and public clouds without being locked into full on-site management or specialized hardware.
The challenge? Traditional VDI infrastructure may require ongoing maintenance, slow innovation, and increase overhead costs. If IT teams can’t scale quickly or simplify management, they risk higher costs, slower delivery, and frustrated end users.
Introducing Horizon Cloud on vSphere
Horizon Cloud on vSphere is a hybrid Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution that lets you run virtual desktops and apps on your existing VMware vSphere infrastructure, while enjoying the benefits of cloud-based management and flexibility of a hybrid solution. With a lightweight ‘edge’ architecture, your on-prem setup connects to the Horizon Cloud control plane. That means you get centralized management, simplified operations, and great performance, all in one streamlined delivery model.
Figure 1: Horizon Cloud on vSphere architecture. The Horizon control plane resides in the cloud, while vSphere workloads remain on-premises.
Why Horizon Cloud on vSphere?
- Choice and flexibility: Deploy across on-premises, hybrid, and public cloud environments - choose what option works best for your business.
- Scalability: Horizon Cloud enables scalability for up to around 20k user sessions per edge, perfect for organizations that need to support large user bases without the complexity.
- Operational simplicity: A centralized cloud control plane managed by Omnissa ensures streamlined management across all connected Horizon environments. Omnissa also handles lifecycle management—meaning upgrades and maintenance are taken care of on your behalf, so you can focus on operations without worrying about infrastructure upkeep.
- Small footprint, stateless on-premises edge: Keep infrastructure light while maintaining robust capabilities. No need to provision connection servers and therefore save on Windows licensing and maintenance costs.
- Broad capabilities: Support for dedicated/floating pools, farms, and apps, plus customer-managed vSphere for ultimate control.
Who’s it for?
- Organizations already using VMware vSphere: Continue to leverage on-premises capacity with familiarity.
- Teams needing low-latency desktop access: have complete control of their desktop capacity while providing a great user experience.
- Businesses seeking a hybrid model that blends on-prem and cloud: can even supplement hyperscaler capacity with unused vSphere capacity in the datacenter.
- Customers looking to move away from legacy desktop and app virtualization vendors while wanting to continue to use vSphere capacity.
Outcomes you can expect:
- Reduced complexity with single vendor-managed VDI and DaaS platform for on-premises and cloud workloads. IT teams can appreciate how easy it is to manage desktops and apps across multiple sites with centralized control and automation.
- Cost reduction with less infrastructure to manage than traditional VDI deployments and the ability to leverage SaaS management services like Image Management Service, Omnissa Intelligence, and App Volumes.
- Faster time to value compared to on-site customer-managed alternatives.
To start a free trial of Horizon Cloud on vSphere, visit Omnissa Customer Connect or follow the steps in this video.