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Most VMware best practices apply to VDI environments, but there are a few changes required due to the nature of high-density VM configurations. For VMware best practices, see the document Dell EMC PowerStore: VMware vSphere Best Practices.
With most applications, storage traffic is typically 70% reads. There are applications that generate all reads or all writes, but the average tends to be 70/30 R/W. VDI is typically 70-80% writes. The array-sizing changes are based on the higher write ratio.
For best practices for Horizon on PowerStore, see the document Dell EMC PowerStore: VMware Horizon Best Practices guide on Dell.com/StorageResources.
There are several factors that determine the optimal volume count with Horizon on PowerStore. There is not a single volume count that fits all scenarios. Performance and management overhead are typically the two most important factors.
For performance reasons, a minimum of 16 volumes is recommended. This configuration ensures good queue balancing and reduces I/O bottlenecks.
This volume recommendation is offset by the need to keep the volume count low for minimized management. The VMware guidance for volume count should also be considered. Internal testing shows that 16 volumes can support 3,600 users from a performance perspective but may have an impact on VM recovery from a backup. Using array-based snapshots reduces recovery time and minimizes the impact of higher user-per-volume counts.
The testing for this configuration was done with 16 volumes for VM storage and 6 volumes for application delivery. The Adobe Reader application was made available using VMware AppVolumes to demonstrate layered application delivery. This also provides application I/O load balancing using a round-robin storage group in AppVolumes.