VMware Horizon View Cloud Pod Architecture (1)

A Dell Technical White Paper

Dell Wyse Datacenter for VMware Horizon View Cloud Pod Architecture A brief guide for the configuration and management of a Cloud Pod environment.

Dell Wyse Solutions Engineering May 2014

2 Dell Wyse Datacenter for VMware Horizon View Cloud Pod Architecture | v.6.5

Revisions

Date Description

May 2014 Initial release v.6.5.0


THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND

TECHNICAL INACCURACIES. THE CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF

ANY KIND.

2014 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this material in any manner whatsoever without the express

written permission of Dell Inc. is strictly forbidden. For more information, contact Dell.

PRODUCT WARRANTIES APPLICABLE TO THE DELL PRODUCTS DESCRIBED IN THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE FOUND

AT: http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/19/terms-of-sale-commercial-and-public-sector Performance of network

reference architectures discussed in this document may vary with differing deployment conditions, network loads, and

the like. Third party products may be included in reference architectures for the convenience of the reader. Inclusion

of such third party products does not necessarily constitute Dells recommendation of those products. Please consult

your Dell representative for additional information.

Trademarks used in this text:

Dell, the Dell logo, Dell Boomi, Dell Precision ,OptiPlex, Latitude, PowerEdge, PowerVault,

PowerConnect, OpenManage, EqualLogic, Compellent, KACE, FlexAddress, Force10 and Vostro are

trademarks of Dell Inc. Other Dell trademarks may be used in this document. Cisco Nexus, Cisco MDS

, Cisco NX-

0S

, and other Cisco Catalyst

are registered trademarks of Cisco System Inc. EMC VNX

, and EMC Unisphere

are

registered trademarks of EMC Corporation. Intel

, Pentium

, Xeon

, Core

and Celeron

are registered trademarks of

Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. AMD

is a registered trademark and AMD Opteron, AMD

Phenom and AMD Sempron are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Microsoft

, Windows

, Windows

Server

, Internet Explorer

, MS-DOS

, Windows Vista

and Active Directory

are either trademarks or registered

trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Red Hat

and Red Hat

Enterprise

Linux

are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Novell

and SUSE

are

registered trademarks of Novell Inc. in the United States and other countries. Oracle

is a registered trademark of

Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Citrix

, Xen

, XenServer

and XenMotion

are either registered trademarks or

trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. VMware

, Virtual SMP

, vMotion

,

vCenter

and vSphere

are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States or other

countries. IBM

is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation. Broadcom

and

NetXtreme

are registered trademarks of Broadcom Corporation. QLogic is a registered trademark of QLogic

Corporation. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming

the marks and/or names or their products and are the property of their respective owners. Dell disclaims proprietary

interest in the marks and names of others.


Table of contents Revisions ............................................................................................................................................................................................. 2

Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 5

VMware Horizon View Cloud Pod Architecture ...................................................................................................................... 5

Understanding Cloud Pod Architecture ....................................................................................................................................... 6

Configuring and managing a Cloud Pod Architecture environment ...................................................................................... 7

Entitling Users and Groups in a Pod Federation.......................................................................................................................... 7

Firewall Port Requirements ............................................................................................................................................................. 8

Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 8


Introduction

In recent years, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployment has grown drastically, VDI solutions have

begun to proliferate in the market. VDI offers corporate IT a wealth of benefits, ranging from easier

software license administration to simplified desktop rollout. For smaller organizations, VDI is just the tool

they need to mobilize the entire company in one project; and for larger organizations, it offers mobility for

the most demanding group of users while a larger rollout is planned. As IT computing environments

become larger and more complex, data protection and disaster recovery continue to be a large

consideration for keeping users, data, and intellectual property protected. End users have become

increasingly reliant on computing resources being available and data at their disposal. Employees travel to

different client location or different branch offices of the same company to provide services and user

wants to connect to the same desktop every time they login, Irrespective of their location. To address

these challenges, centralized management of multiple IT sites, multi-data-center and global entitlement

solutions to assign and manage desktops and users are needed which are robust, work seamlessly, and

easy to manage. VMware has developed and integrated Cloud Pod Architecture to address these

challenges, which are discussed further in the following section.

VMware Horizon View Cloud Pod Architecture

Virtual desktops provided by View can be deployed using a block and pod architecture, or design. A

Horizon View pod consists of a set of View Connection Server instances, shared storage, a database

server, and the vSphere and network infrastructures required to host desktop virtual machines. A typical

Horizon View pod can consist of 500 to 10,000 virtual desktops hosted across a single or multiple ESXi

clusters managed by a management building block. However, each View pod is an independent entity that

has its own user entitlements and is managed separately. Now with VMware Horizon 6, new cloud pod

architecture you can have 4 pods, across two sites, servicing 20,000 users. In a traditional Horizon View

implementation, you manage each pod independently. With the Cloud Pod Architecture feature, you can

join together multiple pods to form a single Horizon View implementation called a pod federation. A pod

federation can span multiple sites and datacenters and simultaneously simplify the administration effort

required to manage a large-scale Horizon View deployment.

Users can connect to a single namespace with a global URL and it will look up their global entitlements

across View pods and sites. This is achieved through a combination of the Cloud pod architecture, global

load balancing, and Local load balancing. You can assign a site to your pods and users can have a home

site. A home site is the affinity between a user and a Cloud Pod Architecture site. Home sites ensure that

users always receive desktops from a particular datacenter, even when they are traveling. If a home site is

not setup the cloud Pod Architecture feature delivers the nearest available desktop in the pod federation. If

all of the desktops in the local datacenter are in use, the Cloud Pod Architecture feature selects a desktop

from the other datacenter.

Use cases include:

Disaster Recovery in an active/passive configuration.


Active/active configuration to extend the entitlement capabilities across sites and beyond the

10,000 connection pod constraints.

Global roaming users.

Balance load across multiple datacenters separated by distance.

Centrally and securely manage virtual desktops spread out across multiple locations.

New data layer replication across all Horizon Connection Servers (such as pool configurations and

user entitlements).

Understanding Cloud Pod Architecture

Figure 1 Federated View pods

The above figure depicts two View pods. Pod 1 is located in a data center in the United States, and Pod 2 is

located in a data center in India. Each pod has two connection brokers VCS 1 and VCS 2 in Pod 1 and VCS

3 and VCS 4 in Pod 2. Both Pod 1 and Pod 2 maintain their own user entitlements, which provide a

mapping of end users to a virtual desktop in the respective pod. The two standalone View pods in a

different data centers are joined together to form a single pod federation. An end user in this environment


can connect to a View Connection Server instance in the United States data center and receive a session

on a desktop in the India data center.

Configuring and managing a Cloud Pod Architecture

environment

Use the lmvutil command line tool to view, modify, and maintain your Cloud Pod Architecture

environment. lmvutil is installed as a part of the View installation located at C:\Program

Files\VMware\VMware View\Server\tools\bin. You can use the View Administrator console to monitor the

health of pods in the pod federation. Currently, there is no federated view for desktop pools on the view

administrator console. Figure 2 shows and example of the federated view of pod health status.

Figure 2 Federated pool health status

Entitling Users and Groups in a Pod Federation

In a traditional View environment, the View Administrator is used to create entitlements. These local

entitlements entitle users and groups to a specific desktop pool on a View Connection Server instance. In

a Cloud Pod Architecture environment, global entitlements are created to entitle users or groups to

multiple desktops across multiple pods in the pod federation. When global entitlements are used, it is

unnecessary to configure and manage local entitlements. Global entitlements simplify administration,

even in a pod federation that contains a single pod.


Each global entitlement contains a list of member users or groups, a list of the desktop pools that can

provide desktops for entitled users, and a scope policy. The desktop pools in a global entitlement can be

either floating or dedicated pools. You specify whether a global entitlement is floating or dedicated during

global entitlement creation. However, HTML access to View desktops via global entitlement is currently

not supported. Below is the example of how to create global entitlement via the lmvutil command line

tool.

Figure 3 Creating global entitlements using the lmvutil command line utility

Firewall Port Requirements

The following ports are required for proper operation in a Cloud Pod Architecture environment.

Port Description

22389 The Global Data Layer LDAP instance runs on this port. Shared data is replicated on every View Connection Server instance in a pod federation. Each View Connection Server instance in a pod federation runs a second LDAP instance to store shared data.

8472 The View Interpod API (VIPA) interpod communication channel runs on this port. View Connection Server instances use the VIPA interpod communication channel to launch new desktops, find existing desktops, and share health status data and other information.

Table 1 Port requirements

Conclusion

The Cloud Pod Architecture is a significant advancement in designing View solutions for an enterprise

organization by giving administrators visibility from regional and global perspectives. It also provides more

options when building out your functional requirements and logical design. The View Cloud Pod

Architecture will provide multi-site federated components with replicated content to provide location-

aware delivery of content to reduce the latency to the source and provide flexibility for deployment by

leveraging on-premises implementation, as well as public and hybrid cloud options to match your current

or planned delivery model. Load balancing and other power features are baked into the design to build out

a more resilient, redundant infrastructure for your organization.

Documents

VMware Horizon View Cloud Pod Architecture (1)