Red Hat collaborating with Omnissa to bring Horizon virtual desktops to OpenShift Virtualization

Choice and flexibility are essential in today's IT environments. That's why Omnissa is collaborating with Red Hat to enable organizations to deploy virtual desktops and applications using Omnissa Horizon on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. In the coming months, this collaboration will provide organizations with a modern, Kubernetes-native option for deploying and managing virtual machine-based (VM-based) virtual desktops and published applications alongside modern container-based applications, without having to maintain separate virtualization silos.

Why this matters

Organizations continue to rely on virtual machine VM-based applications for critical workloads, even as they accelerate their shift to containers and Kubernetes. Maintaining separate virtualization and container platforms can lead to unnecessary silos, duplicate processes, and higher costs.

By enabling Omnissa Horizon on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, customers will be able to:

• Run Horizon-based virtual desktops and apps on OpenShift Virtualization
   
• Simplify monitoring and operations with a unified platform for policies, automation, and governance
   
• Modernize workloads at the desired pace, supporting current VM workloads while introducing new cloud-native applications, including AI

Omnissa is a digital work platform leader, trusted by thousands of organizations worldwide. Omnissa’s integrated platform and solutions deliver exceptional employee experiences that optimize security, IT operations, and cost. Omnissa Horizon, formerly part of VMware’s End-User Computing business, is an industry-leading platform for delivering secure, scalable virtual desktops and applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Horizon includes capabilities such as on-demand application delivery and management via Omnissa App Volumes, Omnissa Dynamic Environment Manager, and secure access gateway using Omnissa Unified Access Gateway.

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, built on the mature and widely used KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor, extends Red Hat OpenShift to run VMs alongside containers. IT teams can manage both types of workloads with a consistent set of management tools and processes, automation, and security policies.

By combining Red Hat’s hybrid cloud expertise with Omnissa’s digital workspace capabilities, organizations will be able to gain:

• Simplified VDI and modern application deployment: With Horizon's VM-based infrastructure, customers can more easily deploy virtual desktops alongside their containerized application workloads using OpenShift Virtualization.  
   
• Streamlined infrastructure management: IT can more easily eliminate silos between VDI infrastructure and container platforms for more efficient management.
   
• A flexible modernization path: IT can choose to support today’s VM-based workloads while preparing for the adoption of container-native services.

Looking ahead

Red Hat and Omnissa are collaborating on joint reference architectures and customer enablement resources to help organizations accelerate their virtualization strategies.

As of today, customers can already deploy Horizon manual pools and farms with OpenShift Virtualization. For more information about this current capability, visit the Omnissa Community technical blog.

“Red Hat is pleased to collaborate with Omnissa to enable Omnissa Horizon on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, enabling IT teams with the flexibility to innovate in support of new workloads on the same platform they use Horizon to deliver virtual desktops. This enables them to deliver virtual desktops with the same level of agility, operational consistency, automation, and security policies they use for their cloud-native applications, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge.” said Stephen Gordon, Sr. Director, Product Management, Red Hat

“Our collaboration with Red Hat will give customers the added ability to manage their Horizon-based virtual desktops and apps in a containerized environment. The extensibility of the Omnissa platform gives customers the flexibility to more seamlessly manage their digital workspace across multiple environments,”  said Arindam Nag, VP, Product Management, Omnissa.

Learn more

• Explore Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.
• Discover more about Omnissa Horizon.

Contact Red Hat or Omnissa to discuss how this collaboration can support your virtualization and workspace strategy.