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VDI Design Guide—VMware Horizon 8 on Dell vSAN Ready Nodes with 3rd Generation AMD EPYC Processors
Executive summary Solution architecture
Solution architecture
Architecture overview
Enterprise solution pods
Scaling the solution
Key components Performance testing Design guidance Conclusion References Appendix A: Definition of performance metrics

Scaling the solution

Home > Workload Solutions > Virtual Desktop Infrastructure > Design and Implementation Guides > VDI Design Guide—VMware Horizon 8 on Dell vSAN Ready Nodes with 3rd Generation AMD EPYC Processors > Scaling the solution

Scaling the solution

  • VMware vSAN based solutions provide flexibility as you scale, reducing the initial and future cost of ownership. Add physical and virtual servers to the server pools to scale horizontally (scaling out). Add virtual resources to the infrastructure to scale vertically (scaling up).

    Scaling out

    Each component of the solution architecture scales independently based on the required number of supported users. You can add appliance nodes at any time to expand the vSAN Software Defined Storage (SDS) pool in a modular fashion. The scaling limit for vSAN is restricted by the limits of the hypervisor to 64 nodes per block.

    The boundary for a Horizon block is the vCenter. The number of virtual machines a vCenter (and therefore a block) can host depends on the type of Horizon 8 VMs being used. The recommended limits for a Horizon block at the time of writing are:

    • 12,000 full clone VMs
    • 12,000 instant clone VMs

    For the latest sizing guidance, see VMware Configuration Maximums and VMware Horizon 7 sizing and limitations and recommendations.

    This design guide uses instant clones, as shown in Figures 2 and 3. We used design limits of 4,000 instant-clone VMs per block and up to 12,000 VMs per pod. VMware Horizon pools have a limit of 4,000 VMs, so additional pools are necessary when scaling above that.

    The VMware Horizon management infrastructure and the virtual desktop user VMs are located on separate vSphere clusters. Four management nodes are a suitable configuration to start with to provide redundancy and self-healing and can be scaled as appropriate. This logical model can be implemented using VMware Validated Designs or using VMware Cloud Foundation.

    The following figure shows a 4,000-user pod supporting up to 4,000 Knowledge-User VMs with a single resource block and a single vSphere cluster. With the above limits in mind, 20 compute nodes with 200 Knowledge-User VMs per node across one vSphere clusters would reach the maximum number of VMs for the block.

    A combined management and compute architecture could also be used, which would eliminate the need for a separate management cluster. In this configuration, each pod contains its own vCenter Server instance and VDI components.

    Figure 2. 4,000-user Horizon block and pod

    The following figure shows a scale-out to a 12,000-user Horizon vSAN pod with 4,000-user blocks:

    Figure 3. 12,000-user Horizon vSAN pod with 4,000-user blocks

    Scaling up

    Dell Technologies recommends a validated disk configuration for general-purpose VDI. These configurations leave drive slots available for future vertical expansion and ensure that you protect your investment as new technology transforms your organization.

    Note: These configurations can accept additional or faster processors or more memory than the guidance provided here.

    For more information about Horizon pod/block architecture and scaling, see the VMware Horizon Architectural Overview on the VMware Tech Zone.