VMware Horizon vs Amazon WorkSpaces: Which is a better fit?

Praveen K: Hey, my name is Praveen and I work as a system administrator, and I rate VMware Horizon four out five. For more videos like this, click below. We used to run into issues by using the virtual desktops. We used to have Citrix XenApp. We always has to have some network issue and then slowness in the VDI. After moving to VMware Horizon, all these issues have been resolved. Due to COVID, we started using work from home, and for security purposes, instead of using the laptops, we are providing virtual desktops to all the user so that the application code and everything will be more secure when compared to laptops. We worked on Citrix, and then we also looked for some cloud virtual desktop, but finally we picked VMware Horizon for our virtual desktops. Installing VMware Horizon is not too difficult. We also get support from VMware for installing the host, and it's pretty straightforward and the documentation will help us in installing the VMware Horizon. If you are a midsize to a large size enterprise, and if you are worried more about the security and giving laptops to the end user, I recommend VMware Horizon for virtual desktops.

Justin: Hey, I'm Justin, DevOps Engineer. And I give Amazon Workspaces three out of five stars. For more reviews like these, please click the link below. Before using Amazon Workspaces, we had Peak provision with laptops working remotely. This did tend to work on a certain level, but the logistics of shipping all those laptops to all those different places to all those people, and not having anybody local in IT there ready to go to troubleshoot, was a little bit complicated. We chose Amazon Workspaces because we're already a big AWS shop. We are centralizing all of our cloud operations on AWS, and we figured this would be a lot less effort than shipping all those laptops to all those different places. Rather than having to worry about purchasing, especially right now with the hardware shortage, provisioning, transporting, repairing, with a couple of clicks, we could just make a brand new workspace for somebody who comes in. The hardest part about getting Amazon Workspaces up and running was learning how to connect it to our on-premises active directory environment. So, the product itself was relatively straightforward after that, but the network challenge of getting it set up over a site-to-site VPN, making sure everything was working properly, was a little bit of trial and error at first. After that, it wasn't too hard to figure out how to make bundles for producing your own workspace images. It was simple enough that our help desk folks have been able to take that over, largely unassisted. If you're thinking about Amazon Workspaces for your environment, be aware that their pre-existing bundles or platforms are a little bit limited. If you're a Linux guy, like me, they have Amazon Linux 2, which is based on Enterprise Linux 7. That's a little outdated at this point. And now that we're switching more to Ubuntu, that's kind of inconvenient for us. On the Windows side of things, be aware that it's Windows Server that they have, and not Windows 10 or Windows 11. So if you have anything that runs specifically on desktop Windows, it's not going to work on the Windows workspaces.