5.0

Table Of Contents
Table 4-10. Example of a LAN-Based View Building Block
Item Example
vSphere clusters 2 or more (with up to 8 ESX/ESXi hosts in each cluster)
80-port network switch 1
Shared storage system 1
vCenter Server with View Composer 1 (can be run in the block itself)
Database MS SQL Server or Oracle database server (can be run in the
block itself)
VLANs 3 (a 1Gbit Ethernet network for each: management network,
storage network, and VMotion network)
With vCenter 4.1 and 5.0, each vCenter Server can support up to 10,000 virtual machines. This support enables
you to have building blocks that contain more than 2,000 View desktops. However, the actual block size is also
subject to other View-specific limitations.
If you have only one building block in a pod, use two View Connection Server instances for redundancy.
Figure 4-1. Components of a VMware View Building Block
2 VMware
ESX clusters
VMware
vCenter Server
8 hosts 8 hosts
shared storage
2000 users
Shared Storage for View Architectures
Storage design considerations are one of the most important elements of a successful 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 VMware 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.
From an architectural perspective, View Composer creates desktop images that share a base image, which can
reduce storage requirements by 50 percent or more. You can further reduce storage requirements by setting a
refresh policy that periodically returns the desktop to its original state and reclaims space that is used to track
changes since the last refresh operation.
VMware View Architecture Planning
46 VMware, Inc.