With Horizon 6 adding support for RDS, Application pools is getting a lot of buzz. With application pools, you can deliver a single application to many users. The application runs on a farm of RDS hosts. However, you can use a farm of hosts to deliver hosted shared desktops (HSVD). I suspect in reality this will shift lots of workload over at least from the task worker use case.
To get HSVD setup with Horizon 6 you have to:
Once the farm is created you can go to desktop pools and pick the appropriate option.
Nutanix Value
1) Quick Clones\VMCaliber Clones – Horizon 6 does not support View Composer for RDS so there could be a potential for lots of storage to be gobbled up. VMCaliber Clones have no negative impact on performance, allow for fast deployment and is available in every Nutanix software edition.
Check out the space saving from quick clones. 84 GB to 12KB
2) Data Locality & Fair Share – Fair Share from 2012 R2 to gives predictable user experience so one user does not negatively impact the performance of another user’s session. Combined with data locality as the cluster scales, IO performance will be consistent and not users can’t steal or bleed the rest of the performance from users on other nodes.
3) Tunable Redundancy Factor – Starting with the Pro Software Edition and up you can allow VM’s to have greater resiliency by creating additional copies of data. Since VMCaliber clones(per vm snaphots\clones) are reducing the foot print the added capacity cost of higher Replication Factor will be mitigated. Now you can lose up to 2 nodes on a 5 node cluster as an example without having to buy additional HDD’s for capacity. Additional block awareness can let you lose an entire block (4 nodes/servers) at the same time without downtime, without requiring any extra space! This all adds up to more capacity for other server workloads in your environment.
Hope see you at VMworld 2014 and talk more on this topic.
DL
