You will need the following hardware and virtual infrastructure components:

The installation and configuration of vCenter and ESXi is beyond the scope of this book and therefore we assume that you already will have this in place.

For production environments, you will need the following minimum hardware and virtual infrastructure components:

Horizon Workspace supports a number of VMware vSphere versions listed as follows:

When setting up your ESXi hosts, ensure that you configure them to use the Network Time Protocol (NTP). Correct time synchronization is critical for a successful installation since the SAML-based authentication is based on short-lived assertions of 60 seconds. If there is a time difference, logins will fail.

The initial deployment of Horizon Workspace will require 5 IP addresses. If you need redundancy and external access, you will need additional IP addresses. Each of the IP's need a static DNS host record as well as reverse pointer-records (PTR record).

DNS name resolution needs to be fully implemented for both forward and reverse lookups. Horizon Workspace will not function without reverse lookups configured.

For this book, we have used Windows Server 2008 R2 Active Directory and DNS; however, Horizon Workspace supports Windows 2003 Active Directory or later. Using Bind DNS will work just as well as using Microsoft DNS.

As we go through the setup of the Active Directory (AD) infrastructure to support our installation, it's worth making a note of some of the key information that you will be prompted for during the actual configuration process. Make a note of the following information:

Before installing the vApp, you need to configure an IP pool for the Horizon Workspace vApp that contains the correct IP address range along with details of your DNS server (you can only specify one DNS server). You also need the name of the domain into which you will deploy your VMs.

For users to log on to their Workspace, you will need to make sure certain network ports are open. For external access, you will need to ensure that the TCP port 443 is open for the connector-va appliance to communicate. For a production environment with a demilitarized zone (DMZ)—a term for a network between internal and external networks—and connection to external services such as Active Directory and RSA SecureID, additional ports may need to be opened. If you are also integrating with Horizon View, you will need to make sure that those ports are also open.

For a production environment, you will need publicly signed certificates from a trusted certificate provider. For a test environment, you can use a self-signed certificate. The certificate must have the FQDN of your Horizon Workspace installation as the Subject Alternative Name (SAN) of the certificate or you can use a Wildcard certificate.