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Environment
9 Dell EMC PowerVault ME4024 and VMware Horizon View with 1,300 Persistent VDI Users | 3919-RA-VDI
3 Solution architecture
3.1 Environment
There are many components required to drive an environment of this scale. They all need to work together to
provide a stable and seamless solution for VDI to work correctly.
3.2 Software
The solution is built on layers of software and hardware. Each component provides a key piece of the puzzle.
3.2.1 Software components
The solution presented in this paper uses the following software:
• VMware Horizon
®
7.6
• VMware vSphere hypervisor 6.7
• VMware vSphere management
• Login VSI
®
(for simulating real-world VDI workloads)
• Microsoft Windows Server
®
2016 and Windows 10
All software components were updated to the most currently available patch level for the tests.
3.2.2 VMware vSphere host
VMware vSphere is the top enterprise virtualization platform used for building VDI and cloud infrastructures.
VMware vSphere includes three major layers: virtualization, management, and interface. The virtualization
layer includes infrastructure and application services. The management layer is central for configuring,
provisioning, and managing virtualized environments. The interface layer includes the vSphere client and the
vSphere web client.
Throughout the solution, all VMware and Microsoft best practices and prerequisites for core services are
adhered to (for example, NTP, DNS, and Microsoft Active Directory
®
). The vCenter servers used in the
solution are VMware vCenter Server Appliances v6.7. All hosts were running vSphere 6.7.
3.2.3 VMware Horizon 7.6
The VDI management platform used was VMware Horizon 7.6 with linked clones. Horizon allows a number of
different cloning options, as well as managing discrete desktops. It is designed to scale to large numbers of
end-points in a single interface and provide consistency and manageability in large environments.
Linked clones were chosen for their management and small footprint. This is a very commonly used
configuration because of its efficiencies and ease of use.