“Handing over” Active Directory data to a hosted service is not something I would want in my environment, especially when our use case would be to provide end users with a self-service application portal for local applications. The Horizon agents retrieves a lease for the application, from the Horizon service, for an administrator configurable number of days (30 days default) and the end-user can run the application, without connecting to the Horizon service, until the lease expires or is renewed.įor many organizations, including mine, this poses a real problem. Subsequent application launches does not require an active connection, as the applications are copied to the local system on the initial run. This also means that users who run a virtualized application provisioned by Horizon Application Manager an active internet connection is required, even if the virtualized application packages are stored on a local (to the user) file share. The hosted service does still needs some information like samaccountname, first name, last name, email and a GlobalUID.įor more details, have a look at Understanding VMware Horizon Application Manager by Eric Sloof.
The connector provides single sign-on (Kerberos) functionality for users already authenticated in your Active Directory and authenticates the user to the Horizon service using SAML, so the hosted service never has the AD password. Sadly my initial excitement quickly faded when I realized that for now Horizon Application Manager is a hosted service, that requires an on premise connector in your infrastructure that sends over a limited set of Active Directory data to enable it to check user account or group access to the applications it offers. The possibility to have your own internal application portal providing your end users with self-service installs of virtualized applications is great news and could potentially be really useful in a great number of organizations. The coupling of the Horizon Application Manager with ThinApp is a great idea, and when I saw today’s announcement I got pretty excited.
From Horizon Administration, you can deploy ThinApp packages, entitle users and groups, track user licenses, and manage application updates. VMware Horizon Application Manager now manages your ThinApp applications making it easier and faster to provide virtualized Windows applications to end users. VMware has announced Horizon Application Manager 1.2, and together with the new ThinApp 4.7 release it promises “end users access to Windows, SaaS and enterprise web applications across different devices while retaining control and visibility via policy-driven management”.
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