Home > Workload Solutions > Virtual Desktop Infrastructure > White Papers > White Paper – Modernizing Retail with Scalable and Highly Available Virtual Desktop Environments > Designed solution
For retail, the solution design approach is to have a business continuity strategy based on Dell VPLEX VS6 that allows active-active data centers in conjunction with VMware-provided automated failover through vSphere high availability functionality. In the event of a disaster in the first data center, the second data center continues operations for all protected applications, including VMware virtual desktop application components. In this architecture, connection servers run outside of VxRail and are protected in the VPLEX environment while the virtual desktops run on VxRail, as shown in the following figure:
In this architecture, instead of having a VMware stretch cluster, Horizon pods run on VxRail with some management components while vCenter, SQL Server, and Connection Brokers are available through the existing VPLEX VS6 virtualization infrastructure. This allows a simple method to achieve high availability, leveraging existing infrastructure through VPLEX while VxRail is dedicated to running virtual desktops.
This approach also enables independent maintenance operations due to splitting components running on different hardware, which allows administrators to move workloads between sites or recreate the environment in the new POD infrastructure like a second or third VxRail system. Another advantage is the maximization of virtual desktops’ resource consumption in VxRail because major components are outside running on VPLEX systems.