The Image Management Service (IMS) is fundamental to the Horizon Control Plane environment. You can use Microsoft Azure, Amazon WorkSpaces Core, and Horizon 8 Edge to deploy images, with different requirements for each platform.
Image Management Introduction
You use IMS to create, customize, and publish image versions for desktop and server entitlements across Horizon Edge deployments.
The system images power up the virtual machines, which provision entitlements to end users. To manage system images, every image customization needs the administrator to add and publish new versions of an image, and update the associated entitlements individually.
The IMS simplifies and streamlines this process by offering the following features and benefits across your Horizon Edge deployments.
- Centralized image catalogs, listing the images with their versions and copies across edges.
- Easy-to-use guided steps to publish an image.
- Entitlements on different cloud-connected edges and sites, which can easily and consistently use the same image version managed by the image service.
- Simplified image versioning to control and track customizations.
Important Terminology
To understand image management, you need to know the terms such as image, version, and copy. An image broadly categorizes the operating system and the virtual machine (VM) model. Each version under this image is a numbered version that is designed for different sets of software on the image and is in the format of major.minor.patch. A copy of each image version is a concrete instance for each Edge. For example, an image named Game can have a version 1.1.0 in the format major.minor.patch and an image copy Game 1.1.0 on various Edges such as Edge-1, Edge-2, Edge-3, and so on.
Once an image version and its copies are created, they are treated as unchangeable. If achanges are needed, they must be made on the minor or major versions if the content is distinct from the source image.
Deployment Platforms
To deploy an image on Microsoft Azure, refer to Managing Horizon Images with Deployments on Microsoft Azure.
To deploy an image on Amazon WorkSpaces Core, refer to Managing Horizon Images with Deployments on Amazon WorkSpaces Core.
To deploy an image on Horizon 8, refer to Managing Horizon Images with Deployments on Horizon 8.
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