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VDI Design Guide—VMware Horizon on VxRail and vSAN Ready Nodes
Executive summary Solution architecture
Architecture overview
Scaling the solution
Enterprise solution pods
Key components Design sizing and guidelines Design enhancements Conclusion References

Scaling the solution

Home > Integrated Products > VxRail > Guides > VDI Design Guide—VMware Horizon on VxRail and vSAN Ready Nodes > Scaling the solution

Scaling the solution

  • 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. Add virtual resources to the infrastructure to scale vertically.

    Scaling out

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

    The boundary for a Horizon block is the vCenter. The number of VMs a vCenter can host depends on the type of Horizon 7 VMs being used. The recommended limit of virtual machines per vCenter is as follows:

    • 12,000 full-clone or instant-clone VMs
    • 4,000 linked-clone VMs

    Sizing recommendations change over time as updates are released and qualifications are performed. See the VMware Horizon 7 sizing limits and recommendations (2150348) Knowledge Base article for the latest recommendations.

    This Ready Solution for VDI uses instant clones, as shown in the following figures.

    VMware recommends a limit of 5,000 instant-clone VMs per block. With these limits in mind, 20 compute nodes with 200 task-user VMs per node would reach the maximum number of VMs for the block.

    The following figure shows a 5,000-user Horizon block:

    Figure 1. Single 5,000-user block

    The following figure shows a scale-out to a 20,000-user Horizon vSAN pod with 5,000 user blocks. Each block contains its own vCenter Server instance and VDI components.

    Figure 2. Scale out for 20,000 users

    Note that the management cluster sizing in the preceding diagrams are recommended minimums, and sizing must be carefully considered as part of any deployment.

    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 memory than the guidance provided here.

    The VMware Workspace ONE and VMware Horizon Reference Architecture provides more information about Horizon pod and block architecture, and scaling.