Overview
When designing a VDI environment, understanding the pieces of the architecture is crucial to ensuring that the solution is deployed correctly. This section describes at a high level the components required to create and deploy a VDI environment.
APEX Console
The APEX Console is a unified cloud management portal with self-service capabilities. With just a few clicks, you can subscribe to new cloud infrastructure and get your resources delivered and deployed to your data center, co-location facility, or edge location in as few as 28 days. With the console you can:
- Manage cloud workloads and services through a single web interface.
- Streamline your operations with real-time actionable insights with the help of integrated monitoring tools.
- Provision, operate, optimize, and grow resources on demand.
- Give users what they need with access based on role, while retaining IT oversight.
VMware vSphere
VMware vSphere provides a flexible and secure foundation for business agility, with the following benefits for VDI applications:
- Improved appliance management—The vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface provides CPU and memory statistics, network and database statistics, disk space usage, and health data. These features reduce reliance on a command-line interface for simple monitoring and operational tasks.
- VMware vCenter Server native high availability—This solution for vCenter Server Appliance consists of active, passive, and witness nodes that are cloned from the existing vCenter Server instance. The vCenter HA cluster can be enabled, disabled, or destroyed at any time. Maintenance mode prevents planned maintenance from causing an unwanted failover. The vCenter Server database uses native PostgreSQL synchronous replication, while key data outside the database uses separate asynchronous file system replication.
- Backup and restore—Native backup and restore for vCenter Server Appliance enables users to back up vCenter Server and Platform Services Controller appliances directly from the vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface or API. The backup consists of a set of files that is streamed to a selected storage device using the SCP, HTTP(S), or FTP(S) protocol. This backup fully supports vCenter Server Appliance instances with both embedded and external Platform Services Controller instances.
- VMware vSphere HA support for NVIDIA vGPU-configured VMs—vSphere HA protects VMs with the NVIDIA vGPU shared pass-through device. In the event of a failure, vSphere HA tries to restart the VMs on another host that has an identical NVIDIA vGPU profile. If no available healthy host meets this criterion, the VM fails to power on.
- VMware vSAN Enterprise Edition—Includes all-flash space-efficiency features (deduplication, compression, and erasure coding), software-defined, data-at-rest encryption, and stretched clusters for cost-efficient performance and greater hardware choice.
- VMware Log Insight—Provides log management, actionable dashboards, and refined analytics, which enable deep operational visibility and faster troubleshooting.
VMware Horizon
The architecture described here is based on VMware Horizon 8, which provides a complete end-to-end solution that delivers Microsoft Windows virtual desktops to users on a wide variety of endpoint devices. Virtual desktops are dynamically assembled on demand, providing pristine, yet personalized, desktops each time a user logs in.
VMware Horizon 8 provides a complete virtual desktop delivery system by integrating several distributed components with advanced configuration tools that simplify the creation and real-time management of VDI.
The core Horizon components include:
- Horizon Connection Server (HCS)—Installed on servers in the data center, HCS brokers client connections, authenticates users, entitles users by mapping them to desktops or pools, establishes secure connections from clients to desktops, supports single sign-on, and sets and applies policies.
- Horizon Administrator—Provides administrator functions such as deploying and managing Horizon desktops and pools, setting and controlling user authentication, and more.
- Horizon Agent—Provides a means of communication with Horizon clients. The agent is installed on all VMs, physical machines, and Terminal Service servers that are used as a source for Horizon desktops. On VMs, the agent communicates with the Horizon client to provide services such as USB redirection, printer support, and more.
- Horizon Client—Installed on endpoints, the client creates connections to Horizon desktops that can be run from tablets, Windows, Linux, or Mac PCs or laptops, thin clients, and other devices.
- Unified Access Gateway—Provides a way to securely deliver connections that require a higher level of security to access, such as remote internet connections.
- Horizon Portal—Provides access to download links for full Horizon clients. The portal enables the HTML access feature to run a Horizon desktop inside a supported browser.
- vCenter Server—Provides centralized management and configuration to the entire virtual desktop and host infrastructure. It facilitates configuration, provisioning, and management services.
VMware Horizon 8 offers the following methods for cloning desktops:
- Full clones—These are typically used for testing purposes or to create management VMs. Full clones are not ideal for VDI because full copies have no connection to the original VM. You must update each VM with this approach.
- Instant clones—These are available with Horizon Universal Subscription, Horizon Standard Subscription, and Horizon Enterprise Edition (TERM) licenses. This technology provisions a VM immediately after a user requests one. This is a far easier approach to operating system updates and patch management because the VM is created when it is needed. You can use the combination of products such as VMware App Volumes and Dynamic Environment Manager to emulate persistence.
vSAN software-defined storage on APEX Private Cloud and APEX Hybrid Cloud
APEX Private Cloud and APEX Hybrid Cloud clusters are backed by VMware vSAN-based shared storage.
After vSAN is enabled on a cluster, all disk devices that are presented to the hosts are pooled to create a shared data store that is accessible by all hosts in the VMware vSAN cluster. VMs can then be created with storage policies assigned to them. The storage policy determines availability, performance, and sizing.
The nodes use Enterprise Class, high performance All-Flash drives. Enterprise Class, high-performance Solid-State Disks (SSDs) are for capacity storage along with high performance NVMe SSDs as cache. You will have multiple storage capacity points to support your compute instances depending on the instance type selected.
When ordering APEX Private Cloud and APEX Hybrid Cloud from the APEX console, and depending on the instance type you selected, you will be presented with three storage capacity options to choose from for the first cluster you configure. The capacity options are presented as raw terabytes (does not account RAID levels or slack space requirements) and are based on the quantity and type of instances you selected.
VMware Cloud Foundation (APEX Hybrid Cloud only)
VMware Cloud Foundation is available in Standard or Enterprise editions. The Enterprise edition includes cloud management components (vRealize). The Standard edition only includes software-defined infrastructure solutions (vSphere, vSAN, NSX including the vSphere with Tanzu add-on).
Networking SDDC and NSX (APEX Hybrid Cloud only)
VMware NSX-T Data Center provides an agile software-defined infrastructure to build cloud-native application environments.
NSX-T Data Center focuses on providing networking, security, automation, and operational simplicity for emerging application frameworks and architectures that have heterogeneous endpoint environments and technology stacks. NSX-T Data Center supports cloud-native applications, bare metal workloads, multi-hypervisor environments, public clouds, and multiple clouds.
NSX-T Data Center is designed for management, operation, and consumption by development organizations. NSX-T Data Center enables IT teams and development teams to select the technologies best suited for their applications.
NVIDIA vGPU
NVIDIA vGPU is the industry's most advanced technology for virtualizing true GPU hardware acceleration to share GPUs between multiple virtual desktops or aggregate and assign them to a single virtual desktop, without compromising the graphics experience. NVIDIA vGPU offers three software variants to enable graphics for different virtualization techniques:
- NVIDIA Virtual Applications (vApps)—Delivers graphics accelerated applications using Remote Desktop Service Host (RDSH).
- NVIDIA Virtual PC (vPC)—Provides full virtual desktops with up to dual 4K monitor support or single 5K monitor support.
- NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation (vWS)—Provides workstation-grade performance in a virtual environment with support for up to four Quad 4K or 5K monitors or up to two 8K monitors.