Understanding Image Management Service (IMS) for VMware Horizon Cloud Service on Microsoft Azure

Challenges of Image Management

1. Typical organizations may have five to 15 unique image payloads as source material for provisioned VMs.
2. Given large deployments, organizations may have to manage significant number of copies (five to 20 or more) per unique image, resulting in 25-100+ image objects in the environment.
3. Often these images need to be updated once or twice a week to keep up with security and application updates, this means 10-30 updates per week in the best case.
4. Orchestrating the workflow to produce, validate and publish images and then to replicate and acclimate them to all the different Horizon destinations is a tedious, manual and lengthy process requiring active monitoring and troubleshooting that is prone to error.
5. Organizations may be spending hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars just shuffling content and managing updates of provisioned workloads.
6. There is no content management system that holistically captures and presents the catalog of images fueling the virtual environment and helps you keep track of your change history.

Image Management Service (IMS) Overview

1. Build a single reusable image catalog rather than manage fleets of duplicate objects. 
2. Focus on Windows settings and line of business application changes.
3. Automate and accelerate the process of image publishing and replication to all your connected sites and Pods.
4. Retain historical trail of which image versions came from which previous versions in case you need to troubleshoot image functions. 
5. Update fleets of pools with a single operation of moving a marker (tag) from an existing image version to the target version.
6. Limitation Note: Due to image format, Horizon Cloud Azure images are limited to use within Horizon Cloud on Azure Pods, and Horizon images are limited to use within Horizon Pods.

IMS (Image Management Service) Publish Process

1. Deploy Image from Marketplace

Log in to HCS Universal Console > Inventory > Images-Multi-Pod > New  > Fill the required details

Marker 

• A marker tag is a unique label that is used to identify a use case that a particular image version is suitable for. Markers are unique, but image versions can have one or more markers assigned to them.
• VM assignments refer to the marker tags in order to identify which image to clone and provision virtual machines from. By using these markers, you can orchestrate the updating or rolling back of images as needed for individual user groups or different assignments if necessary. Change history is recorded in an image version tree.
  

2. Customize Image

Connect with MS Azure Portal > Connect with VM deployed by Image Deployment Process using RDP / Bastion > Do Necessary Customization as per use-case

3. Publish Image

Log in to HCS Universal Console > Inventory > Images-Multi-Pod > Open Image > Select Version > Click on Publish > Wait for  approx 20 minutes.

4. Create Desktop Assignments Using Multi-Pod Image and it's marker

Wait for few minutes and once desktops are deployed in all the Pod, end users can start consuming these desktops.

Note:- These desktops are listed as single desktop when you will check these in desktop properties but these desktops are available as different desktops in Azure Portal

Conclusion

All these capabilities are designed to remove the manual labor out of managing images.

Challenges of Image Management