5.2

Storage and Bandwidth Requirements
Several considerations go into planning for shared storage of desktops, planning for storage bandwidth
requirements with regard to I/O storms, and planning network bandwidth needs.
Details about the storage and networking components used in a test setup at VMware are provided in these
related topics.
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Shared Storage Example on page 50
For a VMware test environment, View Composer replica virtual machines were placed on high-read-
performance solid-state drives (SSD), which support tens of thousands of I/Os per second (IOPS). Linked
clones were placed on traditional, lower-performance spinning media-backed datastores, which are less
expensive and provide higher storage capacity.
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Storage Bandwidth Considerations on page 52
In a Horizon View environment, logon storms are the main consideration when determining bandwidth
requirements.
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Network Bandwidth Considerations on page 52
Certain virtual and physical networking components are required to accommodate a typical workload.
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View Composer Performance Test Results on page 54
These test results describe a 10,000-desktop setup, in which one vCenter Server instance managed 5 pools
of 2,000 View desktops each. Only one maintenance period was required for provisioning a new pool or
for recomposing, refreshing, or rebalancing an existing pool of 2,000 virtual machines. A logon storm of
10,000 users was also tested.
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WAN Support and PCoIP on page 55
For wide-area networks (WANs), you must consider bandwidth constraints and latency issues. The
PCoIP display protocol provided by VMware adapts to varying latency and bandwidth conditions.
Shared Storage Example
For a VMware test environment, View Composer replica virtual machines were placed on high-read-
performance solid-state drives (SSD), which support tens of thousands of I/Os per second (IOPS). Linked clones
were placed on traditional, lower-performance spinning media-backed datastores, which are less expensive
and provide higher storage capacity.
Storage design considerations are one of the most important elements of a successful Horizon View
architecture. The decision that has the greatest architectural impact is whether to use View Composer desktops,
which use linked-clone technology.
The external storage system that vSphere uses can be a Fibre Channel or iSCSI SAN (storage area network), or
an NFS (Network File System) NAS (network-attached storage). The ESX/ESXi binaries, virtual machine swap
files, and View Composer replicas of parent virtual machines are stored on this system.
The following example describes the tiered storage strategy used in a test setup in which one vCenter Server
managed 10,000 desktops.
Physical storage
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EMC VNX7500-block only
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1.8TB Fast Cache (SSD)
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Eight 10Gbit FCoE front end connections (4 per controller).
SSD storage tier
A single RAID5 storage pool:
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12 * 200GB EFD
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250GB LUN for parent images
VMware Horizon View Architecture Planning
50 VMware, Inc.