This document is intended for architects and consultants involved in planning, design and deployment of Horizon 7 in order to provide service providers with a digital workspace solution offering. This document is not a reference architecture or validated design. The purpose of this document is to provide guidance for designing the digital workspace specifically for service providers, adopting guidance and real-world best practices.

Horizon 7 uses a “building block” approach to allow enterprise customers to scale, while minimizing support costs and deployment risks. Service providers, however, must be able to provide each “building block” or instance as a managed service to its customers, while maintaining a distinct advantage to enterprises using Identity Management, Single Sign-On (SSO), VMware User Environment Manager™, and application delivery mechanisms.

The “building block” approach is based on real-world implementations from many of the largest VMware deployments in production today. This document will break these down into single-tenant “Pods” that can be leveraged by service providers offering a managed service, and providing a solution that includes: