General best practices for sizing your deployment include:
- User density—If concurrency is a concern, calculate how many users need the environment during the peak utilization. For example, if only 80 percent are using the environment at any time, the environment must support only that number of users (plus a failure capacity).
- Disaster recovery (DR)—For DR planning, implement a dual or multi-site solution, as recommended by Dell Technologies. The goal is to keep the environment online and, if there is an outage, to perform an environment recovery with minimum disruption to the business.
- Management and compute clusters—For small test environments, it is acceptable to use a combined management and compute cluster. For environments deployed at a larger scale, Dell Technologies VDI Solutions recommends that you separate the management and compute layers. When creating a management cluster for a large-scale deployment, consider using the PowerEdge R660 platform to reduce the data center footprint. With a larger variety of configuration possibilities, the PowerEdge R860 or R760 platforms are preferred for compute clusters.
- Network isolationWhen designing for larger-scale deployments, consider physically separating the management and VDI traffic from the vSAN traffic for traffic isolation and to improve network performance and scalability. This design illustrates a two-NIC configuration per appliance with all the traffic separated logically using VLAN.
- Slack space—Dell Technologies recommends using the VMware best practice of reserving 15-20% slack space within each datastore with either thin provisioned virtual disks or snapshots.