Prediction: Desktone replaces Horizon View as VMware's on-premises VDI solution

Last week I wrote about VMware buying Desktone, which I believe was a good move. If nothing else it instantly thrusts VMware into a leadership position in the DaaS / cloud desktop space (whether it's real or perceived is irrelevant), and at the moment Citrix doesn't really have anything to offer that's similar. (More on that in a bit.)

Why did VMware make this acquisition? My belief is it's a technology and market perception play, rather than VMware wanting to buy an install base. Also I believe they had to buy something like Desktone because the Horizon View platform was designed for more simple on-premises VDI environments, and you just can't grow or scale that architecture to the huge environments with multi-tenancy you need to run a DaaS service.

That said, how long will VMware support two VDI products? Sure, I (and others) argued that VDI and DaaS are not the same things. But if I'm looking at VMware, I'm thinking it's far easier to scale Desktone "down" to on-prem VDI as opposed to scaling View "up" to a DaaS platform.

And what would they lose? Desktone still works with PCoIP and all the cool View clients. The architectural changes in Horizon Mirage 4.3 that make it work in VDI scenarios would work fine with Desktone VDI too. Same for Persona, ThinApp, and everything else. And I can't imagine that it would be too hard to plug Desktone into the Horizon Suite.

Replacing View with Desktone would also make it much easier to build the "hybrid cloud" for desktops thing they want to do. Since both would run on the same platform, it would be much easier to enable cool features like cloud-bursting and single management consoles that allow customers to manage on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud pools of desktops from a single pain of glass with a single management framework.

Let's face it: View has always had scalability issues. Well, maybe I shouldn't say "issues," but I can say for sure that View isn't scaling to tens of thousands of users anytime soon. If you look at the huge View environments you find that while a single customer might be using View for 40k seats, they actually have something like ten smaller 4k View systems rather than a single huge 40k one.

So that's my prediction—that at some point we see the legacy Horizon View go away, replaced by Desktone. Customers would still be able to deploy it on premises, and it would support PCoIP and Mirage and all the other things that customers use View for today. Honestly after talking to a lot of people who have struggled with View over the past few years, this decision can't come soon enough! And I would love it.