Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has become indispensable for organizations looking to streamline operations, improve remote access, and bolster security. While Omnissa Horizon has been a dominant force in the VDI landscape, it often comes with significant cost and management overhead. For IT professionals who want to optimize their VDI investments, the Leostream® Remote Desktop Access Platform offers a compelling alternative, delivering powerful capabilities at a fraction of the cost, with easier management and greater flexibility.
One of the primary concerns for enterprises using Omnissa is the high licensing cost. Omnissa Horizon’s licensing model often bundles features into tiers that may include capabilities an organization doesn’t need. Additionally, scaling an Omnissa deployment usually leads to increased costs due to the complexities and constraints of the overall ecosystem.
The Leostream® Remote Desktop Access Platform addresses these issues head-on with a flexible, all-inclusive licensing model. Unlike Omnissa, which adds costs for Linux VDI and advanced management, security, and end-user experience features, every Leostream license includes all the features and functionality that are available in the Leostream Platform, including Windows and Linux VDI and support for an array of hosting platforms, cloud providers, and display protocols. This all-inclusive licensing model allows IT teams to integrate the necessary components and migrate between technologies to reduce unnecessary expenditures selectively.
For organizations with fluctuating demand—such as seasonal businesses or those undergoing expansion—the Leostream Platform’s elastic architecture allows IT to expand and contract without being beholden to Microsoft Windows licensing. Unlike Omnissa components, the core Leostream Platform components are installed on Linux operating systems, ultimately improving the return on investment (ROI) of your VDI environment as it grows.
Another significant advantage of transitioning to the Leostream Platform is the simplification of VDI management. Managing an Omnissa VDI deployment can become complex as the environment grows. Horizon requires administrators to navigate multiple management interfaces and lacks tools for automating capacity across hybrid clouds. This complexity and inefficiency increase the time and cost of managing the VDI infrastructure.
The Leostream Platform solves these issues by offering a single, centralized management interface that covers all aspects of your VDI environment. Whether you are managing on-premises resources, cloud-hosted desktops, or hybrid setups, Leostream’s management console simplifies the process. The platform consolidates VDI, remote desktop, and physical desktop management into a single pane of glass, providing IT administrators with streamlined control over virtual machines, user session policies, and load-balancing.
The Leostream Platform’s automation features further enhance the efficiency of managing VDI environments. Tasks such as provisioning, powering on and off, and de-provisioning virtual and cloud-hosted desktops are automated, reducing the need for manual intervention and helping minimize cloud costs. This minimizes the chances of human error and frees IT staff to focus on strategic initiatives rather than day-to-day VDI maintenance.
The Omnissa Horizon 8 architecture can limit the flexibility required by enterprises looking to adopt hybrid or multi-cloud strategies. Its reliance on vSphere and vCenter for on-premises management makes it challenging for organizations to integrate with non-VMware hypervisors.
The Leostream Platform, however, is designed with flexibility at its core. It offers multi-vendor support, enabling organizations to choose the hypervisors, clouds, and remote access protocols that best fit their needs. Whether leveraging on-premises virtualization from VMware, pursuing virtualization using Red Hat OpenShift, moving to a public cloud such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, or going open source with OpenStack on top of KVM or Xen, Leostream ensures seamless integration across all environments.
This flexibility empowers IT teams to optimize their VDI infrastructure by mixing and matching the best tools for their specific requirements. The result is a more agile, responsive environment that supports hybrid or multi-cloud strategies without vendor lock-in. By removing these constraints, organizations can quickly scale or modify their VDI deployments, ensuring they stay ahead of business demands.
VDI environments are inherently resource-intensive, often demanding significant investments in compute power, storage, and networking to perform efficiently. Desktop usage in an on-premises Omnissa Horizon environment must be carefully managed to avoid over-investing in additional hardware or other resources, particularly when supporting a fluctuating workforce that includes seasonal or contract workers.
The Leostream Platform excels in efficient resource management, minimizing the overhead required to maintain a robust VDI environment. The platform’s intelligent connection brokering ensures that users are directed to the best available resource, whether a virtual desktop in the cloud, a physical machine, or an on-premises VDI resource. By optimizing resource allocation dynamically, Leostream ensures that IT teams make the best use of existing infrastructure, often extending hardware lifecycles and reducing the need for frequent upgrades.
Additionally, the Leostream Platform’s automated provisioning features allow organizations to deploy exactly what they need—no more, no less—ensuring that unused or underutilized resources are minimized. This translates into substantial cost savings on hardware, storage, and networking and lower power and cooling costs in the data center.
For many organizations, the future of VDI lies in cloud or hybrid deployments that blend on-premises infrastructure with public or private cloud resources. While Omnissa supports cloud integration, its solutions are often tied to Horizon Cloud or specific service providers, limiting an organization’s ability to adopt a true multi-cloud or hybrid approach.
Leostream breaks down these barriers with its extensive cloud compatibility, supporting many public clouds, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The platform allows organizations to move workloads fluidly between on-premises and cloud environments or spread resources across multiple cloud providers to ensure high availability and cost optimization.
The Leostream Platform’s vendor-neutral strategy is particularly beneficial for businesses that need to scale quickly or want to maintain flexible disaster recovery solutions. The platform’s ability to easily integrate cloud-hosted virtual desktops into an existing VDI environment allows businesses to capitalize on the cloud’s scalability without the limitations imposed by traditional Omnissa setups.
Security is paramount in any VDI deployment, especially in industries with strict compliance regulations or where sensitive data is managed. Omnissa Horizon offers extensive security options, but many come at an additional cost.
The Leostream Platform provides built-in security features as part of its core offering, ensuring that organizations can protect their VDI environments without costly add-ons. Multi-factor authentication (MFA), role-based access control (RBAC), and secure tunneling are included, helping enterprises secure access to desktops and data while simplifying compliance management.
The platform’s support for Zero Trust architecture further enhances security, reducing the risk of breaches by ensuring no device or user is inherently trusted. This built-in approach to security ensures that businesses can maintain rigorous security standards without increasing the management complexity that often comes with Horizon’s ecosystem.
For organizations seeking to optimize their VDI investments, the Leostream Platform offers a superior alternative to Omnissa Horizon in terms of cost, flexibility, and ease of management. By providing a vendor-neutral, scalable solution, Leostream helps enterprises reduce both licensing and operational costs while simplifying VDI management. Its support for hybrid and multi-cloud environments ensures businesses can evolve their infrastructure to meet future demands without being locked into a specific ecosystem.
Streamlining resource management and enhancing security without the need for expensive add-ons or complex integrations further boosts the return on investment for enterprises transitioning to Leostream.