Architecture Planning

Table Of Contents
Shared Storage Example
For a View 5.2 test environment, View Composer replica virtual machines were placed on high-read-
performance solid-state drives (SSD), which support tens of thousands of I/Os per second (IOPS). Linked
clones were placed on traditional, lower-performance spinning media-backed datastores, which are less
expensive and provide higher storage capacity.
Storage design considerations are one of the most important elements of a successful View architecture. The
decision that has the greatest architectural impact is whether to use View Composer desktops, which use
linked-clone technology. The ESXi binaries, virtual machine swap files, and View Composer replicas of
parent virtual machines are stored on the shared storage system.
The external storage system that vSphere uses can be a Fibre Channel or iSCSI SAN (storage area network),
or an NFS (Network File System) NAS (network-attached storage). With the Virtual SAN feature, available
with vSphere 5.5 Update 1 or later, the storage system can also be aggregated local server-attached storage.
The following example describes the tiered storage strategy used in a View 5.2 test setup in which one
vCenter Server managed 10,000 desktops.
NOTE This example was used in a View 5.2 setup, which was carried out prior to the release of VMware
Virtual SAN. For guidance on sizing and designing the key components of View virtual desktop
infrastructures for VMware Virtual SAN, see the white paper at
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsan/VMW-TMD-Virt-SAN-Dsn-Szing-Guid-Horizon-
View.pdf.
The Virtual SAN feature available with vSphere 6.0 and later releases contains many performance
improvements over the feature that was available with vSphere 5.5 Update 1. With vSphere 6.0 this feature
also has broader HCL (hardware compatibility) support. For more information about Virtual SAN in
vSphere 6 or later, see the Administering VMware Virtual SAN document.
Physical storage
n
EMC VNX7500-block only
n
1.8TB Fast Cache (SSD)
n
Eight 10Gbit FCoE front end connections (4 per controller).
SSD storage tier
A single RAID5 storage pool:
n
12 * 200GB EFD
n
250GB LUN for parent images
n
500GB LUN for infrastructure
n
75GB LUNs for replica stores (1 per desktop pool cluster)
Virtual machine desktop
storage tier
Two RAID 1/0 storage pools:
For pool 1:
n
360 15K 300GB HDD (47TB usable)
n
97 450GB LUNs for desktops
For pool 2:
n
296 15K 300GB HDD (39TB usable)
n
7 450GB LUNs for infrastructure
n
85 450GB LUNs for desktops
This storage strategy is illustrated in the following figure.
Chapter 4 Architecture Design Elements and Planning Guidelines for Remote Desktop Deployments
VMware, Inc. 57