Add vCenter Server Instances to Omnissa Horizon 8

If you plan to deploy Horizon 8 on a VMware virtualization platform, you must configure Horizon 8 to connect to the vCenter Server instances in your deployment. vCenter Server creates and manages the virtual machines that Horizon 8 uses in desktop pools and RDS farms.

If you run vCenter Server instances in a Linked Mode group, you must add each vCenter Server instance to Horizon 8 separately. Horizon 8 supports one or multiple vCenter Servers added to the same Horizon pod, as well as a single vCenter Server across multiple Horizon pods.

Horizon 8 connects to the vCenter Server instance using a secure channel (TLS).

(For Horizon 8 version 2309 and later) Make sure that at least (N/2)+1 nodes are up and running in the pod, where N is the total number of nodes registered in a pod. If the number of up and running nodes is less than (N/2)+1, then none of the provisioning or imaging operations will go through.

Warning: After adding a vCenter Server to Horizon and creating managed desktop pools or farms, do not rename any vSphere objects in use by those pools or farms, such as Data Centers, Clusters, Datastores, or Resource Pools. Renaming these objects can cause Horizon to lose its reference to those objects, causing future provisioning and power operations to fail. Rename vSphere objects before creating pools or farms, or when those objects are not referenced by existing Horizon pools or farms. For more information, see Omnissa Knowledge Base article 1015100.

Prerequisites

• Install the Horizon product license key or enable your subscription license by connecting to the Omnissa Horizon Control Plane.

• Prepare a vCenter Server user with permission to perform the operations in vCenter Server that are necessary to support .

• Verify that there is a TLS server certificate installed on the vCenter Server host. In a production environment, install a valid certificate that is signed by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA).

  In a testing environment, you can use the default certificate that is installed with vCenter Server, but you must accept the certificate thumbprint when you add vCenter Server to Horizon 8.

• Verify that all Omnissa Horizon Connection Server instances in the replicated group trust the root CA certificate for the server certificate that is installed on the vCenter Server host. Check if the root CA certificate is in the Trusted Root Certification Authorities > Certificates folder in the Windows local computer certificate stores on the Horizon Connection Server hosts. If it is not, import the root CA certificate into the Windows local computer certificate stores.

  See Import a Root Certificate and Intermediate Certificates into a Windows Certificate Store.

• Verify that the vCenter Server instance contains ESXi hosts. If no hosts are configured in the vCenter Server instance, you cannot add the instance to Horizon 8.

• Verify that the domain administrator account that you use as the vCenter Server user was explicitly assigned permissions to log in to vCenter Server by a vCenter Server local user.

• Familiarize yourself with the settings that determine the maximum operations limits for vCenter Server.

Procedure

1. In Omnissa Horizon Console, navigate to Settings > Servers.

2. On the vCenter Server tab, click Add.

3. In the vCenter Server Settings Server address text box, enter the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the vCenter Server instance.

   The FQDN includes the host name and the domain name. For example, in the FQDN myserverhost.companydomain.com, myserverhost is the host name and companydomain.com is the domain.

   Note: If you enter a server by using a DNS name or URL, Horizon 8 does not perform a DNS lookup to verify whether an administrator previously added this server to Horizon 8 by using its IP address. A conflict arises if you add a vCenter Server with both its DNS name and its IP address.

4. Enter the name of the vCenter Server user.

   For example: domain\user or user@domain.com

5. Enter the vCenter Server user password.

6. Enter a description for this vCenter Server instance.

7. Enter the TCP port number.

   The default port is 443.

8. Select the deployment type for your vCenter from the drop-down menu.

   Deployment Type	Description
   AWS	vCenter is deployed on VMware Cloud on AWS
   Azure	vCenter is deployed on Azure VMware Solution
   DELLEMC	vCenter is deployed on VMware Cloud on Dell EMC
   Google	vCenter is deployed on Google Cloud VMware Engine
   Oracle	vCenter is deployed on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution
   General	vCenter is deployed on-premises or in an environment not listed above

9. Under Advanced Settings, set the concurrent operations limits for vCenter Server operations.

10. Click Next and follow the prompts to complete the wizard.

What to do next

If Horizon 8 uses multiple vCenter Server instances, repeat this procedure to add the other vCenter Server instances.