To get the most out of this book, you should have some experience of working as a desktop administrator with skills and knowledge associated with building and designing Microsoft Windows-based desktop environments. You should also be familiar with the VMware vSphere platform (ESXi and vCenter Server) and be comfortable with building and configuring virtual machines as well as configuring storage and networking for use in a virtual infrastructure.

Throughout this book, you will have the opportunity to follow step-by-step practical guides in deploying Horizon View in an example lab environment. If you want to work through the practical examples, you will need the following software:

• VMware Horizon 7 or version 7.6, 7.7, or 7.8
• vSphere for Desktop (ESXi and vCenter Server 6.5)

You can download a trial copy of Horizon 7 from the following link (you will need to have a VMware account):

https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=horizon-7

You will also need the following software to build virtual machines and deploy applications:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2016 64-bit
• Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 32-bit or 64-bit
• Microsoft Windows 10
• Microsoft SQL Express 2012
• Microsoft Office 2016

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/9781789802375_ColorImages.pdf.

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "This second instance of the Connection Server is going to be installed on the virtual machine with the hostname hzn7-cs2.pvolab.com that was built at the start of this chapter."

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

net stop certsvc
net start certsvc

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "In the Select Database Owner box, click OK to accept the database owner."