These documentation topics here apply when you have just received the Welcome to the VMware Horizon Service email and are ready to onboard your first pod. This onboarding set of topics outlines the relationship between the Horizon universal license and your Horizon Cloud tenant account. The license entitles you to use the cloud-hosted services as well as use the subscription licensing with your pods. This topic and its subtopics also outline the process for your first-time onboarding a pod to Horizon Cloud. This first-time onboarding flow is the key that enables you to exploit your Horizon subscription licenses, onboard your existing Horizon pods to cloud-hosted services, deploy new pods in Microsoft Azure, and leverage all of the cloud-hosted services that VMware Horizon® Cloud Service™ currently provides for cloud-connected pods.

You onboard an existing Horizon pod to the cloud for two primary use cases: to activate a subscription license for that pod and enable your use of those cloud-hosted services that Horizon Cloud provides for that type of pod. You onboard a pod in Microsoft Azure by using the Horizon Cloud Administration Console to deploy that pod into your Microsoft Azure cloud subscription.

Tip: If you already have at least one cloud-connected pod, instead of this onboarding set of topics, use the companion administration set of topics for information about how to onboard subsequent pods after doing your very first one.

Relationship Between Onboarding Your First Pod with the Horizon Universal License, the My VMware Account Associated with That License, Your Horizon Cloud Tenant, and the Welcome Email

At a high-level, the connect-the-dots between these elements is:

  1. Get a subscription license. Currently the Horizon universal license is the license to get. The license will be associated with the specific My VMware account that is used in the license request.
  2. VMware sets up the new Horizon Cloud tenant account, associates it with the same My VMware account with which the Horizon universal license is associated, and specifies one of the regional Horizon Cloud control plane instances for the account. The information in the license request is used to determine which regional control plane instance is appropriate for the tenant account. These regional control plane instances are related to the data centers that host the cloud control plane, as described in the service description document available from the Horizon Cloud Service Description and Service Level Agreement page.
  3. VMware sends the Welcome to the VMware Horizon Service email to the email address that is configured in the My VMware account in step 1 and with which the license is associated. For an example of this welcome email, see the following screenshot. Among other information, the email states the My VMware account and region that are associated with the tenant account. The stated region appears as one of the following strings: USA, Europe, Australia, USA-2, Europe-2, and Australia-2.
    Note: On June 9, 2020, the Welcome email was updated to standardized regional names. If you received your email before that date, your email contains one of these system-generated strings: USA, EU_CENTRAL_1, AP_SOUTHEAST_2, PROD1_NORTHCENTRALUS2_CP1, PROD1_NORTHEUROPE_CP1, and PROD1_AUSTRALIAEAST_CP1.

    Screenshot example of the top portion of the Welcome email.
  4. After the email is received, you read the information it contains and use the hypertext links in the Getting Started section to get to key destinations. Those URLs link you to the tenant environment portal (named the Horizon Cloud Administration Console or console for short), the Horizon Cloud Connector software download location, and online documentation.
Important: After the email is first received, it is prudent to log in to the tenant environment portal using the initial My VMware account and add additional My VMware accounts for those people you want to enable to onboard pods and manage onboarded pods. Adding those people even before onboarding your first pod prevents delays involving timely access to your tenant account. As an example, a delay might occur if the original person is no longer available in your company and you have no one on your team who knows the credentials to log in. Access to your tenant account is needed to onboard pods, as well as to perform related workflows, such as reconfiguring the Horizon Cloud Connector. If access to your tenant account is interrupted as a result of the main person leaving your organization, you would have to open a support request to VMware to update the tenant account's associated My VMware account, which could cause a delay in your logging in to the onboarding and management portals.

For the steps to add additional My VMware accounts to log in to your tenant account, see Add Administrators to Log in to Your Horizon Cloud Tenant Environment.

Getting the license

You must get the license first, because that is the point at which VMware generates your Horizon Cloud tenant account and environment.

Your new Horizon Cloud tenant account in the cloud control plane

Your Horizon Cloud tenant account is important to you even when your only use case is to use a subscription license with your existing Horizon pods, and not imagining using cloud-hosted services with your pods. The reason why this tenant account is important to you is that same tenant account is use for both:

  • Logging in to the Horizon Cloud Connector onboarding and management portal. The Horizon Cloud Connector portal is used for onboarding a Horizon pod to the cloud to use the subscription license, as well as to enable cloud-hosted services. After you complete the initial onboarding of the Horizon pod, you can log in to the Horizon Cloud Connector portal at any time to manage features of the connector itself.
  • Logging in to the cloud-based Horizon Cloud tenant environment portal, named the Horizon Cloud Administration Console or console for short. This administrative console is used to add additional administrators so that they can also use the Horizon Cloud Connector onboarding and configuration portal besides the initial My VMware account that got the license. This console is also used to access the cloud-hosted services, such as the Cloud Monitoring Service's monitoring dashboard and reports and the pod deployment wizard for deploying into Microsoft Azure.
How that tenant account relates to the My VMware account associated with the license

A My VMware account must be used to obtain the Horizon universal license in the first place. As a result, that My VMware account is the initial one registered with the newly created Horizon Cloud tenant account and environment, and is used for the login credentials to the Horizon Cloud tenant account (used by both portals listed above). When the tenant account is created, the Welcome to the VMware Horizon Service email is sent to the specific email address that is configured that My VMware account. The following screenshot is an illustration of the welcome mail. You must ensure that you or someone in your organization is able to get the welcome email from that email account which is associated with the My VMware account which was used to purchase the subscription license, so that you'll can make use of the links in that email to go to downloads for the Horizon Cloud Connector, open the administrative console, and so on.

The following screenshot illustrates a sample of the welcome email and calls out where the My VMware account is referenced.


Screenshot of an example of the welcome email with arrows to where the My VMware account information is referenced.
Your new Horizon Cloud tenant environment and its portal

As soon as you get the welcome email from VMware, the associated My VMware account can log in to that newly created Horizon Cloud tenant environment, even when you have zero cloud-connected pods. However, at this initial point, the administrative console provides access to a single initial screen and a small subset of cloud-hosted workflow actions within that screen.

The following screenshot shows the console at the point in time when your tenant account is first created. The list that follows describes the key actions you can take in that screen prior to onboarding your first pod.


Screenshot of the initial Getting Started page before any pods are connected to your Horizon Cloud environment.

Tip: Click on the General Setup bar in that screen to see two of the key actions that are listed below.
  • Learning how to onboard an on-premises Horizon pod, in the On-Premises row.
    On-Premises row in tenant portal's Getting Started screen
  • Learning how to onboard a Horizon pod in to your SDDC capacity in VMware Cloud on AWS, from the Add Cloud Capacity row's Add button.
    Add Cloud Capacity row in tenant portal's Getting Started screen.
  • Deploying a pod into Microsoft Azure, from that same Add Cloud Capacity row's Add button.
    Add Cloud Capacity row in tenant portal's Getting Started screen.
  • Adding administrators to whom you want to give the ability to log in to the Horizon Cloud Connector onboarding and configuration portal and the Horizon Cloud Administration Console (the portal to your tenant environment). The My VMware account that was used for setting up the tenant is prefilled there by default. As a result, you will see that row marked with a green check mark. However, that is only because there is always the one initial My VMware account associated with the tenant account when the tenant environment is created.
    Tip: To prevent being locked out of both your tenant environment and the Horizon Cloud Connector onboarding and configuration portal due to the initial My VMware account going inactive for some reason — such as that person leaving your company or organization — it is prudent to add additional administrators as soon as you receive the Welcome to Horizon Service email, even before you onboard a pod for the first time.

    My VMware Accounts row in tenant portal's Getting Started screen.
  • Enablement of the Cloud Monitoring Service (CMS). The CMS is enabled by default, so you will see that row marked with a green check mark. At this point, you can choose to toggle off that feature even prior to onboarding any pods.
    Cloud Monitoring Service row in tenant portal's Getting Started screen
Tip: Before you can access other actions and workflows in that portal beyond the above four, you must have an onboarded pod, that pod must be up and online and communicating with the cloud management plane, and have an Active Directory domain registered with your tenant environment. The console blocks access to other management actions until the Active Directory domain registration workflow is completed. For information about this workflow, see Performing Your First Active Directory Domain Registration in the Horizon Cloud Environment.

Onboarding Requirements Checklists

If your first pod onboarding is to exploit your Horizon subscription license with an existing Horizon pod before starting the steps described in this onboarding documentation set, first read VMware Horizon Pods with Horizon Cloud - Requirements Checklist - Updated As Appropriate for Connecting Pods Starting From the July 2020 Service Release. That topic describes various prerequisite elements needed to successfully connect a Horizon pod to Horizon Cloud. After the Horizon pod is cloud-connected, the Horizon subscription license is pushed from the cloud to the pod and you can start enabling the cloud-hosted services for that pod within the administrative console itself.

If your first pod onboarding is in Microsoft Azure, before starting the steps described in this onboarding documentation set, first read VMware Horizon Cloud Service on Microsoft Azure Requirements Checklist For New Pod Deployments - Updated As Appropriate for Pods That Deploy Starting From the July 2020 Service Release. That topic describes various prerequisite elements needed to have a successful first pod deployment into Microsoft Azure.

Revision History for these Onboarding Topics

This documentation set of topics is updated with each release of the product or when necessary.

This table provides the update history.

Revision Description
8 Sep 2020 Updates made to the screenshots in this guide to align with the availability of the Manage menu on the Getting Started page. Also an update to Horizon Cloud Connector Known Considerations.
18 AUG 2020 Updates made to align this guide with the Horizon documentation to adopt the terms base image and golden image, as appropriate for each topic's context.
5 AUG 2020 Updates made to align this guide with the availability of the new regional cloud control plane in Japan. The following documentation topics are updated for that regional control plane's DNS names: DNS Requirements for a Horizon Cloud Pod in Microsoft Azure and DNS, Ports, and Protocols Requirements When Using Horizon Cloud Connector and a Horizon Pod.
9 JUL 2020 Initial version, when the described features were deployed live into production.

This document describes the latest service features.

  • For pods using Microsoft Azure capacity, some of the new features are agnostic to the pod manifest version that is newly made available at the time this service release went live into production, while some of the new features require that new pod manifest version for you to take advantage of those features. See the Release Notes for the service 3.1 release for the pod manifest version that corresponds with this service release and for the list of new features that require that latest pod manifest version.

    For cloud-connected Horizon pods, the latest features correspond to their components at the most recently available VMware Horizon Connection Server software level, connected to the cloud control plane using Horizon Cloud Connector at version 1.7 and later.

Intended Audience

The information in this document is intended for experienced data center administrators with knowledge in the following areas.

  • VMware Horizon and VMware Horizon Connection Server
  • VMware Horizon Cloud Connector
  • VMware Unified Access Gateway™
  • VMware Workspace ONE® Access™
  • Virtualization technology
  • Networking
  • VMware Cloud™ on AWS (VMware Cloud)
  • VMware Horizon on VMware Cloud™ on AWS
  • Microsoft Azure

About the Screenshots

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.
  • In the PDF format, screenshot images that are wider than 6 inches are automatically resized. As a result, such images might appear blurry in the PDF format. In the parallel HTML pages, you can click on such wide screenshot images to see the image at its full-size.
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.
  • In the console, clicking Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure: This image shows the circle help icon that you can use in the console. > Support, displays the link to that KB 2144012 also.

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

Throughout the Horizon Cloud documentation topics, these phrases have the indicated meanings as follows.

Horizon pod
A pod that is constructed based on VMware Horizon product software, and which includes Horizon Connection Server software components.
Horizon Cloud pod
A pod that is constructed by running the Horizon Cloud pod deployment wizard which deploys the pod in Microsoft Azure.
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 running in a pod receives the end-user's client request to make a connection with a virtual desktop VM or farm VM. The connection broker then negotiates a connected session between the agent running in one of the VMs and that end-user client. The negotiation takes into consideration what types of pod-provisioned resources the end user is entitled to make connections with.

One of the responsibilities of the Horizon Connection Server in a Horizon pod is to serve as a connection broker. For a Horizon Cloud pod deployed in Microsoft Azure, one of the responsibilities of the pod manager VM is to serve as a connection broker.

VMware Technical Publications Glossary

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