Horizon View Design Considerations

This is the VMware Horizon View Design Deep-Dive.  I have aggregated all of the design considerations that Wayne Conrad and myself needed to answer for our VMware Horizon View architecture design.  Brevity and bullet-points are used to keep the information concise and readable. They are phrased as questions the architect needs to answer.

List of articles in my VCDX Deep-Dive series (more than 80 posts)

I have separated the design considerations into the areas specified by the VCDX-DTM blueprint. This was before the new VCDX-DTM 2019 blueprint was released, which has been re-organized to include new components and areas.

Business Goals/Problems

• What are the business goals of the solution?
• What are the business problems to be solved?

VDI Assessment

• What was the analysis of the VDI assessment?
• How does that translate to the design?

Customer Use-Cases

• What are the customer use-cases for the solution?

Requirements/Constraints/Assumptions

• What are the requirements, constraints and assumptions of the solution?

Risk Analysis

• What are the risks of the solution and how have you mitigated them?  Are there specific implementation tasks, tests or procedures that can be referenced?

A. Desktop Management Infrastructure – Management Components

Logical Design Decisions

• Private Cloud, Public Cloud or Hybrid Cloud EUC Services?
• Number of Pooled Compute, Network & Storage Resources?
• Management, Control and Data Planes?
• Redundancy of EUC infrastructure?
• IT Service Management integrations?
• EUC infrastructure logging?
• Enterprise Service integrations?
• Advanced Operations Management?

Physical Design Decisions

• VMware Horizon Suite components and version?
• VDI solution integration points?
• Horizon View Sizing and Availability?
• Connection Server Quantity?
• Remote access termination?
• Remote Access Protocols?
• Desktop Pools?
• 3D Graphics Acceleration?
• vROps?
• vRLI?
• Management Cluster?
• vCenter Servers?
• Resource Cluster?
• Enterprise Services?
• Licensing?
• Future expansion of resources?

B. Desktop Management & Resource Infrastructure – Compute Layer

Logical Design Decisions

• Traditional Monolithic Compute, Server-Side Flash Cache Acceleration (with 3-Tier Legacy), Converged Infrastructure, Hyper-Converged Infrastructure or Open-Converged Infrastructure?
• Minimum Hypervisor Hosts per Cluster?
• Host sizing: “Scale Up” or “Scale Out”?
• Number of Sockets per Host?
• Host spanning and rack redundancy?
• Hypervisor Workload Protection Mechanism?
• Hypervisor Workload Resource Balancing Mechanism?
• Required CPU Capacity?
• Required Memory Capacity?

Physical Design Decisions

• Compute vendor and model?
• x86 processor type?
• x86 processor features?
• vGPU needed?
• Number of hosts required?
• vSphere High Availability?
• vSphere DRS?
• Host striping?
• Future expansion of compute resources?

C. Desktop Management & Resource Infrastructure – Network Layer

Logical Design Decisions

• Legacy 3-Tier Switch, Collapsed Core, Clos-type Leaf/Spine (TRILL/SPB) fabric, Manhattan Mesh Fabric, Layer 3 fabric?
• Clustered Physical or Standalone EoR/ToR Switches?
• Stretched or Per Rack VLANs?
• Functional traffic types separated with virtual Switches or VLANs?
• MTU size?
• Quality of Service?
• Load Balancing?
• IPv6 or IPv4?
• WAN requirements?
• Required Network Capacity?
• Single-vNIC or Multi-vNIC VMs?

Physical Design Decisions

• Access switches?
• Layer 3 Gateway?
• LAG?
• Out of Band management?
• Physical LAN performance?
• Host connectivity?
• WAN links?
• QoS?
• VLANs and Spanning Tree?
• SR-IOV?
• TCP Offload?
• Virtual Switch?
• Virtual Switch teaming?
• VMkernels?
• Portgroups?
• Layer-2 overlay?
• Campus network?
• Future expansion of network resources?

D. Desktop Management & Resource Infrastructure – Storage Layer

Logical Design Decisions

• Traditional Monolithic Storage, Server-Side Flash-Cache Acceleration, Converged Infrastructure, Hyper-Converged Infrastructure or Open-Converged Infrastructure?
• Block-based or IP-based Storage Access?
• Automated storage management?
• RDM devices?
• Hypervisor DAS boot, LUN boot or network boot?
• Thin or Thick Provisioning?
• Required Storage Resources?
• Storage replication needed for VM Templates, User Profiles and User Data?

Physical Design Decisions

• Storage vendor?
• Storage policies?
• Hybrid or All-Flash?
• Storage services?
• Cache device?
• Storage controller and queue depth?
• Storage disk design?
• Fault domains?
• Datastores?
• Host boot method?
• Enterprise file services?
• Storage replication?
• Future expansion of storage resources?

E. Desktop Resource Infrastructure – View Virtual Machine Layer (this is not listed in the blueprint, however it is called out in the VCDX application form)

Logical Design Decisions

• Virtual Machine Sizes?
• Virtual Machine CPU and RAM management?
• Virtual Machine files?
• Standard or Non-Standard/32-bit or 64-bit Guest OS?
• Virtual Machine templates?
• Virtual Machine Guest OS settings?

Physical Design Decisions

• VDI CPU and RAM sizing?
• vDisks?
• Thin or thick provisioning?
• VDI snapshots?
• VDI OS?
• VDI vSCSI?
• VDI vNIC?
• VDI VMware Tools?
• VDI VM options?

F. End User Experience Infrastructure – Endpoint Devices

Logical Design Decisions

• Thin Clients, Thick Clients, or Zero Clients?
• Browser Accessibility?

Physical Design Decisions

• Endpoints?

G. End User Experience Infrastructure – Peripherals

Logical Design Decisions

• Peripherals?

Physical Design Decisions

• Peripherals?

H. End User Experience Infrastructure – Application Integration

Logical Design Decisions

• Application Lifecycle Management and Application Layering?
• Application integration?

Physical Design Decisions

• App Volumes Sizing?
• App Volumes sites?
• App layering?
• App Lifecycle Management?

I. End User Experience Infrastructure – Profile Management

Logical Design Decisions

• Profile Management?

Physical Design Decisions

• UEM Configuration and Profile Location?
• Environment customization?

J. Desktop Management & Resource Infrastructure – Data Protection

Logical Design Decisions

• VM Image Backup Frequency?
• Application and Database Consistent Backup Frequency?
• Backup Restore Times?

Physical Design Decisions

• VADP used?
• Backup/Recovery solution?
• Backup/Restore mechanism?

K. Desktop Management & Resource Infrastructure – Information Security

Logical Design Decisions

• Zones of Trust?
• Defence-in-Depth?
• EUC security mechanisms?
• Physical separation requirements?
• Microsegmentation?
• Compliance standards?
• Virtualisation security requirements?
• Required Network Security Capacity?

Physical Design Decisions

• Physical and Virtual Network Zoning?
• VMware NSX-v/NSX-T required?
• RBAC?
• Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)?
• Network Security Performance?
• VDI security settings?
• Security Information & Event Management (SIEM)?
• ESXi host security?
• Network security?
• Storage security?
• Data Protection security?
• VM security?

L. Desktop Management & Resource Infrastructure – BC/DR

Logical Design Decisions

• Protection Mechanisms?
• Manual or Automated Run-books?
• RPO, RTO, WRT and MTD of VDI services?
• Global Site Load Balancers?
• DNS TTL for clients?

Physical Design Decisions

• DR Automation solution?
• GSLB solution?

M. Data Center Facility

Logical Design Decisions

• Data Center types?
• Number of sites?

Physical Design Decisions

• Data Center Facility locations?
• Power, cooling and weight calculations?