We use it at my job and I really don’t understand exactly how it works. Not everyone has a machine with it but most do (including me). I thought of myself as fairly tech savvy, but am somewhat lost here.
In: Technology
VMWare Horizon is a desktop virtualisation software. What this means is that instead of having an operating system (OS) installed on a computer that starts up when the computer is turned on and then communicates directly with the hardware, the VMWare program instead starts and then starts an OS from an ‘Image’ while pretending to be the hardware that OS should run on.
The benefit of doing things this way is that it makes it a lot harder for anything running within the OS (applications and all other activity that the user of the computer is doing) to affect (read: break) the computer itself, since the virtualisation software forms a kind of firewall around the Image. Likewise, if the operating system or any of the applications running within it need to be updated, you can just create a new Image where you carried out the updates and then distribute that Image to all the computers that should use it.
If a virus (or faulty update, as seen recently with CloudStrike) somehow gets into the OS for example, that might normally break the computer itself and/or be very hard to remove or fix afterwards, but with virtualisation those bad changes are contained within the image and can thus just be overwritten by a fresh image that you know will work. In some cases you might even make it so that the image itself can’t actually be changed and instead ‘resets’ whenever the computer is booted up, and any data the user creates or changes by using the computer must instead be saved to a server or some other external storage device outside of the image.
Virtual Machines (VMs) like these can be used in other situations as well. You could make physical servers for example that run one or more ‘Virtual Servers’ as separate VMs. The virtual servers don’t know or care that they are sharing hardware, and if you ever need to move one of them to new hardware, you just move the image to the new hardware and start it up there, and it will basically run identically to how it did on the old hardware. This is essentially how ‘the Cloud’ works.
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