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Quick guide on deploying a Horizon based WLD in VCF 3.7.x. First off there are a bunch of prerequisites that are required before you start.

1. VI WLD that was previously deployed using VCF
2. VxLAN PortGroup for VDI Components.
   • MGMT – For horizon mgmt VMs ( Mandatory)
   • DMZ – If utilizing a UAG (Optional)
   • Interconnect – If utilizing a UAG (Optional)
3. SQL Server deployed. Statically assign the SQL port number to 1433 as opposed to dynamically.
4. Windows Sever Image.
5. AD Sever Deployed. With relevant OU created
6. DNS
7. Licenses

VCF utilizes the Horizons Pod Block approach as recommended by Horizon reference architecture for deployment. This blog does a great job in detailing the approach.

SDDC Manager can be leveraged to deploy

• Connection Server
• Composer Server ( For Linked Clones – Optional)
• UEM Sever ( Optional – Requires external Share for user profile data.)
• App Volume Severs (Optional)
• UAG – User Access Gateways (Optional)
• Load Balancer VMs

Within SDDC Manager click on + Workload Domain, and select Horizon.

Create a new Horizon Domain

Set Domain Name, VM prefix, upload your windows server image. This will be used to deploy the Horizon MGMT VMs. Note the Mgmt Port group is set to a VxLAN Portgroup

Choose which VI-WLD you want to enable as a new Horizon POD.

Specify your Active Directory details, including which OU you want your soon-to-be deployed Horizon VMs to be located in.

Specify the SQL connection details. Databases will be created and configured for

• Connection server
• VDI events

Load balancers can be created for

• View Connection Server ( Mandatory)
• UAG ( Optional)
• App Volume Servers (Optional)

View Connection Server.

Define your App Volume data, choose a load balancers and set SQL info.

Review your parameters and configuration.

Validate the information

Review the Validation info.

Click Finish and kick off the workflow.

Post Deployment we can see that Horizon has been tagged on the WLD

In vCenter we can see the newly deploy Horizon MGMT Stack and resource pool. We have successfully deployed and configured

• View Connection Servers
• App Volume
• Pair of Load Balancers x2

In SDDC Manager we can see the service VMs associated with the WLD

We can click on the Horizon Connection Server to access the Horizon Manager UI.

Once we log in we can see that all components have been configured.

We can go directly to add a new Desktop Pool.

I am going to choose to deploy a Floating Pool.

As i have chosen not to deploy a Composer server i will select Instant Clones

Specify Desktop Pool ID

Here i enabled the HTML access to i can login use the Web browser.

Specify a naming algorithm for my VDI’s. Also set the number of VMs to deploy.

Setting Storage Policy Management. VCF uses vSAN as its primary datastore.

Select your VDI Gold Image and Snapshot. Also set VM folder location and resource pool data.

Set OU details for your new VDI Desktops to be placed in.

Review your details. Note that i have selected to Entitle Users once the wizard has finished.

Entitle a group of users to login after deployment. These users will have access to login post deployment.

Here we can see our new Desktop Pool

In the vCenter view we can see the deployed desktops and clone replicas.

Logging in to the Horizon connection server via my HTML Browser to access my new desktop.

Nice.