Technical data

Solution Architectural Overview
VMware Horizon View 5.3 and VMware vSphere for up to 2,000 Virtual
Desktops Enabled by Brocade Network Fabrics, EMC VNX, and EMC Next-
Generation Backup
85
Table 12. Number of disks required for different number of virtual desktops
Virtual desktops
Flash drives (FAST
Cache)
SAS drives
500
2
10
1,000
2
15
2,000
4
30
VSPEX end user computing configurations are validated on the VNX5400
and VNX5600 platforms. Each platform has different capabilities in terms of
processors, memory, and disks. For each array, there is a recommended
maximum VSPEX end-user-computing configuration, which is
demonstrated below. Smaller implementations are supported using the
building block method described in the previous section.
VNX5400
Core storage layout
Figure 25 illustrates the layout of the disks that are required to store 1,000
desktop virtual machines. This layout does not include space for user
profile data. Refer to VNX shared file systems for more information.
Figure 25. Core storage layout for 1,000 virtual desktops using VNX5400
Core storage layout overview
The following core configuration is used in the solution:
 Four SAS disks (0_0_0 to 0_0_3) are used for the VNX OE.
 Disks shown as 0_0_4 and 1_0_0 are hot spares.
 Fifteen SAS disks (shown as 0_0_10 to 0_0_14 and 1_0_5 to 1_0_14)
in the RAID 5 storage pool 0 are used to store virtual desktops.
FAST Cache is enabled for the entire pool.
 For file storage, 10 LUNs of 305 GB each are provisioned from the
pool to provide the storage required to create eight 368 GB NFS
file systems and two 50 GB file systems. The file systems are
presented to the vSphere servers as NFS datastores.
VSPEX end user
computing
validated
maximums