Should I have dedicated vSphere infrastructure (including vCenter) for my View environment?
Saturday, March 5, 2011 at 1:01PM | Matt Lesak Here's a question I get, a lot!
Answer -> Yes! IMO
Here's a few reasons why...
Boot storms - Imagine powering on 50 desktops @ 8AM and having that workload impacting server workloads on the same host and/or vCenter activity. Yes, you can configure several features of vSphere to mitigate the risk, but I'm a firm believer of keeping things simple. Mitigating risk for other infrastructure components should also factor into play as well.
Workload Trends - Typically, server workloads tend to become predictable over time. Desktop workloads tend to be dynamic and more challenging to trend.
Version Challenges - View Composer (the linked clone engine) needs to be installed on vCenter and supports specific builds of vCenter. What if the vCenter that's managing both server and desktop workloads needs to be upgraded to a version that Composer doesn't support? With seperate instances of vCenter, this wouldn't be an issue. Same challenge applies for vSphere as well.
Keep in mind, when you purchase VMware View, all of your vCenter/vSphere licenses are included so don't sweat the cost of additional licenses.
Agree? Disagree? Did I miss something? Post a comment below...
Reader Comments (3)
What should we do with Connection Brokers?
If there are four of them, where should we place them?
- All four in the VDI infra?
- All four in the Server infra?
- Two in the Server Infra and two in the VDI infra?
- Make at least one physical?
AL
Andre,
I think it depends on the scale of your VDI infrastructure. Assuming you had 4 VDI clusters you could host one broker in each cluster as the odds of all 4 clusters going down is rather slim. If you only had a single VDI cluster I'm not sure I'd only host everything in that one cluster, I'd probably split the brokers between VDI and server infra to insure a greater level of survivability.
As with so many things I'm not sure there's only one right way to do it.
-Chuck
I agree with yes and I would add one more point. Different admin teams have their issues to worry about. Seldom are the desktop admins that same folks as the server admins. This kind of blends into the workload issue you raised, but also is more about they way the two environments need to be managed. For example, the VMs in server cluster may only get patched on a monthly basis, but the VDI environment may be getting patched on a more or less frequent basis. Applying the patches becomes more manageable is the environments are separate in this case.