Horizon Cloud on Nutanix is now available

Horizon Cloud on Nutanix has reached Limited Availability. You can now run virtual desktops and apps on Nutanix AHV. Omnissa runs the Horizon platform for you as a cloud service: provisioning, brokering, image lifecycle, and the Edge and gateway infrastructure, all delivered from the Horizon Cloud console.

Your users connect through the Horizon Client over the Blast protocol for a high-performance experience on any device, and Omnissa's operations team monitors the service around the clock. Your Nutanix AHV clusters stay yours: the Horizon platform running on top of them becomes ours to manage.

What's new since Tech Preview

We introduced this solution last year in Announcing the Tech Preview of Horizon Cloud on Nutanix. If you've been following along, here's what has changed:

• Automated Edge and Unified Access Gateway (UAG) deployment. UAG is now deployed and managed by the service, so your team no longer has to.
• Support for multiple clusters, plus faster provisioning that clones an internal template rather than deploying every VM from scratch.
• Multitenancy for managed service providers (MSP). Several customer tenants can share one Prism Central while staying fully isolated, each with its own Horizon Edge, provider instance, and credentials scoped to the project.
• Proven at 1,600 virtual machines (VM). Pool creation, image updates, and pool deletion were all validated at that scale in a customer's production Nutanix environment.

Why customers choose it

• Simplified operations. Omnissa handles brokering, image lifecycle, and power management. You carry on managing your AHV resources, including VM templates, networks, and categories, in Prism Central exactly as you do today.
• Native Nutanix integration. Provisioning and power management run directly through the Prism Central API, so your existing Nutanix investment and your team's skills carry straight over.
• Hybrid flexibility. Run workloads in your own datacenter on AHV; on NC2 in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud; or on any cloud that Horizon supports. It all comes back to one console.
• Built for MSPs and enterprises. Onboard multiple Nutanix sites and customer tenants from a single control plane.

Where it fits best 

Some situations suit this solution more than others. These are the ones where it does its best work.

• You are reviewing Citrix on Nutanix. Licensing changes have prompted many Citrix customers to look at alternatives. If Nutanix is already your platform, you can move without buying new infrastructure or asking your team to learn a different one.
• You want to bring down VDI platform costs. Put the datacenter capacity you have already paid for to work rather than renting the equivalent in the cloud, and retire the pods and controllers you would otherwise run and patch yourself.
• You are a service provider or an MSP. Host several customer tenants on one shared Prism Central, keep each one isolated, and operate all of them from a single control plane with usage reporting per tenant.
• Your desktops need to stay close to your users. Branch offices, plants, clinics, and any site where latency or data residency keeps the workload local, while management still happens from the cloud.
• You want room to extend into the cloud later. Add capacity on NC2 in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, or on another Horizon supported cloud, without changing how your team works day to day.
• You have Nutanix skills you want to keep using. Your team carries on working in Prism Central, so existing runbooks, habits, and expertise stay relevant.

If your team would rather own and operate every component itself, Horizon 8 on Nutanix is still the better starting point. Horizon Cloud is the right choice when you want Omnissa to run the platform for you.

The middle path

Infrastructure decisions made years ago are expensive to keep and expensive to leave. Most of the pressure we hear from customers traces back to that single problem.

Horizon Cloud on Nutanix is built for the middle path. Keep the AHV platform and the team skills you already have. Hand off brokering, image lifecycle, and power management. Add cloud capacity later without changing how your team works day to day. One console, one operational model, and the capacity wherever it makes financial and technical sense.

It is also part of a broader pattern. Over the past year we extended Horizon Cloud to OpenStack, Google Cloud, and Nutanix, and added Self-Managed Pools for staged migrations. Infrastructure is a choice now, not a prerequisite.

Limited Availability means the service is production-ready and fully supported, enabled per tenant with Omnissa involvement during onboarding. Scope and timelines for future releases are subject to change.

Join us at Omnissa ONE in Orlando September 28 to September 30, with stops in Amsterdam and Tokyo this fall, to see where Horizon Cloud goes next.

How to get started

Reach out to your Omnissa field team or email horizoncloudonnutanix@omnissa.com to begin your Limited Availability engagement, or book a demo to see it in action. You can also read more about getting started on Horizon Cloud and managing Horizon Cloud with Nutanix.