Administration

Table Of Contents
Configure View Storage Accelerator for vCenter Server
In vSphere 5.1 and later, you can configure ESXi hosts to cache virtual machine disk data. This
feature, called View Storage Accelerator, uses the Content Based Read Cache (CBRC) feature in
ESXi hosts. View Storage Accelerator improves Horizon 7 performance during I/O storms, which
can take place when many virtual machines start up or run anti-virus scans at once. The feature
is also beneficial when administrators or users load applications or data frequently. Instead of
reading the entire OS or application from the storage system over and over, a host can read
common data blocks from cache.
By reducing the number of IOPS during boot storms, View Storage Accelerator lowers the
demand on the storage array, which lets you use less storage I/O bandwidth to support your
Horizon 7 deployment.
You enable caching on your ESXi hosts by selecting the View Storage Accelerator setting in the
vCenter Server wizard in Horizon Administrator, as described in this procedure.
Make sure that View Storage Accelerator is also configured for individual desktop pools. To
operate on a desktop pool, View Storage Accelerator must be enabled for vCenter Server and
for the individual desktop pool.
View Storage Accelerator is enabled for desktop pools by default. The feature can be disabled or
enabled when you create or edit a pool. The best approach is to enable this feature when you
first create a desktop pool. If you enable the feature by editing an existing pool, you must ensure
that a new replica and its digest disks are created before linked clones are provisioned. You can
create a new replica by recomposing the pool to a new snapshot or rebalancing the pool to a new
datastore. Digest files can only be configured for the virtual machines in a desktop pool when they
are powered off.
You can enable View Storage Accelerator on desktop pools that contain linked clones and pools
that contain full virtual machines.
Native NFS snapshot technology (VAAI) is not supported in pools that are enabled for View
Storage Accelerator.
View Storage Accelerator is now qualified to work in configurations that use Horizon 7 replica
tiering, in which replicas are stored on a separate datastore than linked clones. Although the
performance benefits of using View Storage Accelerator with Horizon 7 replica tiering are not
materially significant, certain capacity-related benefits might be realized by storing the replicas on
a separate datastore. Hence, this combination is tested and supported.
Important If you plan to use this feature and you are using multiple Horizon 7 pods that share
some ESXi hosts, you must enable the Horizon Storage Accelerator feature for all pools that are
on the shared ESXi hosts. Having inconsistent settings in multiple pods can cause instability of the
virtual machines on the shared ESXi hosts.
Prerequisites
n Verify that your vCenter Server and ESXi hosts are version 5.1 or later.
Horizon 7 Administration
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