Specifications

Table 4-8. View Transfer Server Virtual Machine Example (Continued)
Item Example
Virtual network adapter E1000 (the default)
1 NIC 1 Gigabit
Storage and Bandwidth Requirements for View Transfer Server
Several operations use View Transfer Server to send data between the View desktop in vCenter Server and the
corresponding local desktop on the client system. When a user checks in or checks out a desktop, View Transfer
Server transfers the files between the datacenter and the local desktop. View Transfer Server also synchronizes
local desktops with the corresponding desktops in the datacenter by replicating user-generated changes to the
datacenter.
If you use View Composer linked-clones for local desktops, the disk drive on which you configure the Transfer
Server repository must have enough space to store your static image files. Image files are View Composer base
images. The faster your network storage disks are, the better performance will be. For information about
determining the size of base image files, see the VMware View Administration document.
Each Transfer Server instance can theoretically accommodate 60 concurrent disk operations, although network
bandwidth will likely be saturated at a lower number. VMware tested 20 concurrent disk operations, such as
20 clients downloading a local desktop at the same time, over a 1GB per second network connection.
vSphere Clusters
VMware View deployments can use VMware HA clusters to guard against physical server failures. Because
of View Composer limitations, the cluster must contain no more than 8 servers, or nodes.
VMware vSphere and vCenter provide a rich set of features for managing clusters of servers that host View
desktops. The cluster configuration is also important because each View desktop pool must be associated with
a vCenter resource pool. Therefore, the maximum number of desktops per pool is related to the number of
servers and virtual machines that you plan to run per cluster.
In very large VMware View deployments, vCenter performance and responsiveness can be improved by
having only one cluster object per datacenter object, which is not the default behavior. By default, VMware
vCenter creates new clusters within the same datacenter object.
Determining Requirements for High Availability
VMware vSphere, through its efficiency and resource management, lets you achieve industry-leading levels
of virtual machines per server. But achieving a higher density of virtual machines per server means that more
users are affected if a server fails.
Requirements for high availability can differ substantially based on the purpose of the desktop pool. For
example, a stateless desktop image (floating-assignment) pool might have different recovery point objective
(RPO) requirements than a stateful desktop image (dedicated-assignment) pool. For a floating-assignment
pool, an acceptable solution might be to have users log in to a different desktop if the desktop they are using
becomes unavailable.
In cases where availability requirements are high, proper configuration of VMware HA is essential. If you use
VMware HA and are planning for a fixed number of desktops per server, run each server at a reduced capacity.
If a server fails, the capacity of desktops per server is not exceeded when the desktops are restarted on a different
host.
VMware View Architecture Planning
42 VMware, Inc.