This administration collection of pages describes what to do when your first-generation tenant environment has at least one pod in its fleet. This documentation page right here mainly serves as the entry page to the administration collection. The collection includes pages about both day-1 and day-2 tasks in which you use the Horizon Universal Console to manage the pods you have onboarded to the first-generation control plane.

About this Page

Important: Use this information solely when you have a first-gen tenant environment. As of August 2022, Horizon Cloud Service - next-gen is generally available and has its own Using Next-Gen documentation set available here.

An indication of which environment you have, next-gen or first-gen, is the pattern that appears in the browser's URL field after you log in to your environment and see the Horizon Universal Console label. For a next-gen environment, the console's URL address contains a portion like /hcsadmin/. The first-gen console's URL has a different section (/horizonadmin/).

Horizon Plus subscriptions are valid in a next-gen environment. If you have a Horizon Plus subscription, stop reading this page and instead see Horizon Plus Documentation and its linked pages.

Brief Introduction to First-Gen Tenant Administration


Capacity Page in the Horizon Universal Console depicting four pods

Your overall tenant environment consists of the VMware-hosted service and your fleet of pods appropriately deployed and connected to the service's control plane.

To work with your pod fleet and the cloud-hosted management features that the control plane provides, you use the tenant environment's web-based administrative portal named the Horizon Universal Console, or the console for short. For an in-depth introduction to key concepts, see the page Introduction to the Service, Cloud Control Plane, Cloud-Connected Pods, and Related Concepts.

Your Pod Fleet

A tenant's pod fleet consists of one or more:

Horizon pods
These are pods based on Horizon Connection Server software.
Horizon Cloud pods
These are pods based on the VMware Horizon Cloud pod-manager technology specific for running in Microsoft Azure.

The information in this document describes how to use the Horizon Cloud capabilities after you have at least one pod in your tenant's pod fleet. For information on how to add your very first pod to your tenant, see the Deployment Guide's Deployments and Onboarding to Horizon Cloud for Microsoft Azure and Horizon Pods topic and its subtopics.

When You Read About a Feature Here and You Aren't Seeing It in Your Live Environment

Here are some reasons you might not see a feature in the console that you are expecting to see from reading about it in this documentation:

  • These documentation pages reflect the current release of the service and control plane. When you have pod components that are not yet updated to the currently supported release level and a feature depends on having the latest level, your live environment might not reflect what is described in this guide.
  • Also, in a particular release, Horizon Cloud might include separately licensed features. The Horizon Universal Console reflects the elements related to such features only when your license includes use of such features.
  • The service can have features that are only enabled by request on a per-tenant basis. Not all tenants will automatically see the same features.

When you read about a feature in the Horizon Cloud documentation and you are not seeing it in your environment, file a support request as described in VMware KB article 2006985.

Revision History for these Administrative Topics

This documentation set of topics is updated with each release of the product or when necessary. For the set of significant revisions made to date, see Revision History — Changelog.

Intended Audience

This document is intended for experienced IT system administrators who are familiar with virtual machine technology and datacenter operations.

Depending on your organization's needs and the type of pod you are working with, you might find it helpful to be familiar with these software products, software components, and their features:

  • VMware Horizon
  • VMware Horizon® Cloud Connector™
  • VMware Unified Access Gateway™
  • VMware Workspace ONE® Access™
  • VMware Workspace ONE Hub Services
  • VMware Workspace ONE® UEM
  • VMware Horizon® Client™
  • VMware Horizon® HTML Access™
  • VMware Cloud™ on AWS and Amazon Web Services EC2 (AWS EC2)
  • Microsoft Azure and its Marketplace
  • Azure VMware Solution (AVS)
  • Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE)
  • Microsoft Active Directory
  • VMware Dynamic Environment Manager™

About the Screenshots Used in This Document

The screenshots typically:

  • Show only that portion of the overall user interface screen that corresponds to the text at which point the screenshot appears, and not necessarily the full user interface.
  • Have blurred areas where appropriate to maintain data anonymity.
Note: Some screenshots are taken at a higher resolution than others, and might look grainy when the PDF is viewed at 100%. However, if you zoom to 200%, those images start to look clear and readable.

Horizon Cloud Community

Use the following communities to ask questions, explore answers given for questions asked by other users, and access links to useful information.

Contacting VMware Support

Contact VMware Support when you need help with your Horizon Cloud environment.

  • You can submit a support request to VMware Support online using your My VMware® account or by phone.
  • KB 2144012 Customer Support Guidelines provides details for getting support depending on the issue encountered.
  • After you have configured at least one cloud-connected pod, you can submit a support request by logging in to the cloud-based console and clicking Circle help icon in the Horizon Universal Console > Support.

Selected Pod-Related Terminology Used in these Administration Guide Documentation Topics

Throughout the Horizon Cloud documentation topics, you will see the following phrases. These phrases have the indicated meanings as follows.

Horizon pod
A pod that is constructed using the Horizon Connection Server software and related software components. The Horizon Connection Server components are running in an infrastructure that VMware supports for use with such pods. A Horizon pod typically requires a VMware SDDC (software-defined data center). Some examples of VMware SDDCs are an on-premises vSphere environment, VMware Cloud on AWS, Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE), or Azure VMware Solution (AVS), to name a few.
Horizon Cloud pod, Horizon Cloud pod on Microsoft Azure
A pod that is constructed by running the Horizon Cloud pod deployment wizard which automates deployment into your Microsoft Azure subscription. This type of pod is based on VMware Horizon Cloud pod-manager technology, and is supported to run in Microsoft Azure solely.
Note: A Horizon pod on Microsoft Azure is separate and distinct entity from a Horizon pod on Azure VMware Solution (AVS). Those two are based on completely different technology — one is based on Horizon Connection Server technology and one is based on the Horizon Cloud pod-manager technology.
connection broker

A connection broker is responsible for connecting end users' clients with a virtual desktop VM or farm VM for the purpose of setting up a connected session between each end-user client and the agent running in that VM. This noun — broker — is used because one general definition of the noun broker in the English language is one who negotiates a transaction.

In desktop virtualization software's use cases, the connection broker receives the end-user's client request to make a connection with a virtual desktop VM or farm VM. The connection broker then routes the request appropriately and negotiates a connected session between the agent running in one of the VMs and that end-user client. The negotiation considers what types of pod-provisioned resources the end user is entitled to make connections with.

One of the Horizon Control Plane services is the Universal Broker service. Universal Broker is a multi-tenant, cloud-based service that enables the brokering of resources that span multiple pods and makes brokering decisions based on the geographic sites of users and pods.

A Horizon pod's Connection Server or a Horizon Cloud pod's pod manager VM is the component that facilitates the routing of the end-user client to a resource in the pod that meets the client's connection request.

VMware Information Experience Glossary

VMware Information Experience provides a glossary of terms that might be unfamiliar to you. For definitions of terms as they are used in VMware technical documentation, go to http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs.

VMware Privacy Notices

See https://www.vmware.com/help/privacy.html for information about how VMware handles information collected through this product.