One platform, every desktop: Modern virtual management

IT decision-makers today face constant pressure to deliver secure, scalable technology that keeps pace with remote and hybrid work, while keeping costs and complexity low. What's at the heart of hybrid work? Giving people access to apps and resources on their endpoint of choice: desktop, mobile, wearable, shared, or virtual, so work feels easier and more flexible. But supporting a mix of physical and virtual endpoints can quickly get expensive and complicated, especially with disconnected tools and processes.

The Omnissa platform brings together industry-leading Workspace ONE Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) and Horizon VDI (VDI) to unify physical and virtual endpoint management. An integrated platform approach helps IT consolidate management tools, automate desktop enrollment, reduce gold image maintenance, and deliver a better day-to-day experience for both admins and end users, whether you run persistent or non-persistent desktops.

A unified platform for desktop management

Disconnected VDI and device management teams lead to inefficient, fragmented management. Keeping physical and virtual endpoints running too often relies on duplicate effort and redundant licensing, with separate tools, skill sets, and processes.

Horizon excels at scaling VM creation and maintenance, offering a reliable foundation for virtualization. The bigger challenge for many VDI teams lies beyond infrastructure: keeping desktops secure, compliant, and up to date while delivering a seamless experience for end users. For many VDI admins unfamiliar with modern Windows management, this work can feel resource intensive and lean on fragmented legacy tools.

Bring virtual desktops under the same UEM strategy you use for physical devices, and you bridge operational gaps and align workflows. Integrating Horizon virtualization capabilities with Workspace ONE UEM offers a strategic advantage: it simplifies management, supports policy consistency, and provides a holistic approach to both virtual and physical endpoint environments.

These synergies show how forward-thinking IT teams can spend less time juggling multiple tools and refocus their energy on scaling efficiently.

This isn't a theoretical claim. Today, Workspace ONE UEM manages all major virtual desktop platforms, including Horizon 8, Horizon cloud, Amazon WorkSpaces, and Azure Virtual Desktop. Want the full list of what's supported? Check the Omnissa knowledge base.

Automate Horizon desktop enrollment

With legacy tooling, enrollment into a management service can be tedious, filled with manual steps for every desktop. Horizon and Workspace ONE work differently. Admins configure UEM settings once during VM pool creation in Horizon, entering details like the Device Services server URL, organization group ID, and staging credentials at the pool level. That's it. Set it up front, and no one touches it again.

From there, enrollment runs on its own. When an end user opens the Horizon Client and signs in with domain credentials, Workspace ONE UEM creates a device record automatically. No admin intervention. No user intervention. The virtual desktop is ready to use, complete with the apps, resources, and Intelligent Hub experience employees already know.

Since we first announced automated enrollment for Horizon cloud desktops, we've expanded support to include persistent and non-persistent pools for both Horizon cloud and Horizon 8.

One-click gold image auto-updates

Gold image maintenance is another drain on VDI team resources. Every cycle of rebuilding images and refreshing VM pools consumes hours, and by the time an image is ready, it can already be out of date. That leaves admins trapped in constant catch-up, chasing productivity rather than driving it. Consider one customer who spent 80 hours a month maintaining just 16 non-persistent gold images. When manual effort balloons like that, it's not a workflow problem, it's a scalability blocker.

So what happens when you remove the manual work? One-click auto-update, integrated with Image Management Service (IMS) and Freestyle Orchestrator, automates the entire sequence: create a new image version, install Intelligent Hub, provision patches, seal the image, and publish a VM pool for verification. The only manual step left is moving the marker to publish updated pools to production.

This shifts gold image maintenance from reactive catch-up to a continuous, up-to-date security posture across your image fleet. And with a repeatable workflow in place, you reduce the risk of manual errors while keeping images consistently patched, secured, and aligned with compliance standards.

Clean up non-persistent desktop records

Non-persistent desktops get discarded frequently, and orphaned device records pile up as each desktop is created and destroyed. Omnissa Intelligence offers an automated solution, letting admins set a trigger frequency (hourly, every four hours, or daily) to prune devices that haven't reported back.

For large environments, such as a hospital running tens of thousands of desktops, this cleanup is essential to keeping the console usable and accurate. Automated pruning schedules for non-persistent pools keep your environment organized with no added effort. Head to Tech Zone to see how easy it is to configure.

A better experience for admins and end users

None of this matters unless it translates into a better experience on both sides of the help desk. Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub delivers consistent experiences across physical devices and virtual desktops alike, giving users single sign-on (SSO) (SSO) (SSO) access to any app plus self-service resources.

On the admin side, digital employee experience (DEX) for Horizon helps teams track app performance, measure experience scores, and remediate issues proactively before they become tickets. Unified dashboards and actionable insights support smarter decisions, and Workspace ONE Assist adds remote support for physical and virtual Windows desktops alike.

The result ties directly to the metrics IT leaders care about: higher productivity, better user satisfaction, and fewer support incidents.

The bottom line

Consolidating virtual desktop management on the Omnissa platform isn't just about fewer tools. It's about less complexity, stronger security, and a better experience for everyone who touches the environment, from IT admins to end users. If you're already running Workspace ONE UEM for physical endpoints, extending it to your Horizon virtual desktops is the natural next step toward a truly unified endpoint strategy.

Ready to bring every desktop under one platform? Talk to your Omnissa or partner sales team to see it in action.