As part of an evolving multi-cloud strategy, VMware today announced that it is making available the control plane it developed for managing virtual desktops on the Microsoft Azure cloud.
Courtney Burry, senior director of product marketing for VMware, says Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure gives IT organizations yet another public cloud option for deploying a control plane for managing virtual desktops in addition to cloud services provided by IBM and Verizon. The instance of Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure is expected to be available in the second half of this year.
“This is part of our multi-cloud strategy,” says Burry.
Burry says pairing the control plane into a public cloud makes it easier for IT organizations to migrate to Windows 10 across multiple geographies while continuing to support older instances of Windows 7 when necessary.
Since selling off the assets of its own public cloud, VMware has been aggressively moving to make the VMware stack of server, storage and network virtualization software available on a variety of public clouds, including Amazon Web Services, with an eye toward advancing hybrid cloud computing deployments. Given VMware’s dominance of local data center environments, the goal is to make public clouds a natural extension of a local data center by deploying VMware software in both environments.
Most Windows desktops are, of course, not deployed in a virtual environment. But with a little nudge from Microsoft, many more IT organizations are likely to consider their options. After all, even after making the move to Windows 10, there’s always some application running on an older version of Windows that doesn’t quite make the transition as well as anyone would like.
