Dell Wyse Datacenter for VMware Horizon

View Cloud Pod Architecture

A brief guide for the configuration and management of a Cloud Pod environment.
Dell Wyse Solutions Engineering
May 2014

A Dell Technical White Paper

Revisions

Date

Description

May 2014

Initial release v.6.5.0

Dell Wyse Datacenter for VMware Horizon View Cloud Pod Architecture | v.6.5

THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND
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Dell Wyse Datacenter for VMware Horizon View Cloud Pod Architecture | v.6.5

Table of contents
Revisions ............................................................................................................................................................................................. 2
Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 5
VMware Horizon View Cloud Pod Architecture ...................................................................................................................... 5
Understanding Cloud Pod Architecture ....................................................................................................................................... 6
Configuring and managing a Cloud Pod Architecture environment ...................................................................................... 7
Entitling Users and Groups in a Pod Federation.......................................................................................................................... 7
Firewall Port Requirements ............................................................................................................................................................. 8
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 8

Dell Wyse Datacenter for VMware Horizon View Cloud Pod Architecture | v.6.5

Introduction
In recent years, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployment has grown drastically, VDI solutions have
begun to proliferate in the market. VDI offers corporate IT a wealth of benefits, ranging from easier
software license administration to simplified desktop rollout. For smaller organizations, VDI is just the tool
they need to mobilize the entire company in one project; and for larger organizations, it offers mobility for
the most demanding group of users while a larger rollout is planned. As IT computing environments
become larger and more complex, data protection and disaster recovery continue to be a large
consideration for keeping users, data, and intellectual property protected. End users have become
increasingly reliant on computing resources being available and data at their disposal. Employees travel to
different client location or different branch offices of the same company to provide services and user
wants to connect to the same desktop every time they login, Irrespective of their location. To address
these challenges, centralized management of multiple IT sites, multi-data-center and global entitlement
solutions to assign and manage desktops and users are needed which are robust, work seamlessly, and
easy to manage. VMware has developed and integrated Cloud Pod Architecture to address these
challenges, which are discussed further in the following section.

VMware Horizon View Cloud Pod Architecture

Virtual desktops provided by View can be deployed using a block and pod architecture, or design. A
Horizon View pod consists of a set of View Connection Server instances, shared storage, a database
server, and the vSphere and network infrastructures required to host desktop virtual machines. A typical
Horizon View pod can consist of 500 to 10,000 virtual desktops hosted across a single or multiple ESXi
clusters managed by a management building block. However, each View pod is an independent entity that
has its own user entitlements and is managed separately. Now with VMware Horizon 6, new cloud pod
architecture you can have 4 pods, across two sites, servicing 20,000 users. In a traditional Horizon View
implementation, you manage each pod independently. With the Cloud Pod Architecture feature, you can
join together multiple pods to form a single Horizon View implementation called a pod federation. A pod
federation can span multiple sites and datacenters and simultaneously simplify the administration effort
required to manage a large-scale Horizon View deployment.
Users can connect to a single namespace with a global URL and it will look up their global entitlements
across View pods and sites. This is achieved through a combination of the Cloud pod architecture, global
load balancing, and Local load balancing. You can assign a site to your pods and users can have a home
site. A home site is the affinity between a user and a Cloud Pod Architecture site. Home sites ensure that
users always receive desktops from a particular datacenter, even when they are traveling. If a home site is
not setup the cloud Pod Architecture feature delivers the nearest available desktop in the pod federation. If
all of the desktops in the local datacenter are in use, the Cloud Pod Architecture feature selects a desktop
from the other datacenter.
Use cases include:

Disaster Recovery in an active/passive configuration.

Dell Wyse Datacenter for VMware Horizon View Cloud Pod Architecture | v.6.5

Active/active configuration to extend the entitlement capabilities across sites and beyond the
10,000 connection pod constraints.
Global roaming users.
Balance load across multiple datacenters separated by distance.
Centrally and securely manage virtual desktops spread out across multiple locations.
New data layer replication across all Horizon Connection Servers (such as pool configurations and
user entitlements).

Understanding Cloud Pod Architecture

Figure 1

Federated View pods

The above figure depicts two View pods. Pod 1 is located in a data center in the United States, and Pod 2 is
located in a data center in India. Each pod has two connection brokers VCS 1 and VCS 2 in Pod 1 and VCS
3 and VCS 4 in Pod 2. Both Pod 1 and Pod 2 maintain their own user entitlements, which provide a
mapping of end users to a virtual desktop in the respective pod. The two standalone View pods in a
different data centers are joined together to form a single pod federation. An end user in this environment

Dell Wyse Datacenter for VMware Horizon View Cloud Pod Architecture | v.6.5

can connect to a View Connection Server instance in the United States data center and receive a session
on a desktop in the India data center.

Configuring and managing a Cloud Pod Architecture

environment
Use the lmvutil command line tool to view, modify, and maintain your Cloud Pod Architecture
environment. lmvutil is installed as a part of the View installation located at C:\Program
Files\VMware\VMware View\Server\tools\bin. You can use the View Administrator console to monitor the
health of pods in the pod federation. Currently, there is no federated view for desktop pools on the view
administrator console. Figure 2 shows and example of the federated view of pod health status.

Figure 2

Federated pool health status

Entitling Users and Groups in a Pod Federation

In a traditional View environment, the View Administrator is used to create entitlements. These local
entitlements entitle users and groups to a specific desktop pool on a View Connection Server instance. In
a Cloud Pod Architecture environment, global entitlements are created to entitle users or groups to
multiple desktops across multiple pods in the pod federation. When global entitlements are used, it is
unnecessary to configure and manage local entitlements. Global entitlements simplify administration,
even in a pod federation that contains a single pod.

Dell Wyse Datacenter for VMware Horizon View Cloud Pod Architecture | v.6.5

Each global entitlement contains a list of member users or groups, a list of the desktop pools that can
provide desktops for entitled users, and a scope policy. The desktop pools in a global entitlement can be
either floating or dedicated pools. You specify whether a global entitlement is floating or dedicated during
global entitlement creation. However, HTML access to View desktops via global entitlement is currently
not supported. Below is the example of how to create global entitlement via the lmvutil command line
tool.

Figure 3

Creating global entitlements using the lmvutil command line utility

Firewall Port Requirements

The following ports are required for proper operation in a Cloud Pod Architecture environment.
Port

Description

22389

The Global Data Layer LDAP instance runs on this port. Shared data is replicated on every View
Connection Server instance in a pod federation. Each View Connection Server instance in a
pod federation runs a second LDAP instance to store shared data.

8472
Table 1

The View Interpod API (VIPA) interpod communication channel runs on this port. View
Connection Server instances use the VIPA interpod communication channel to launch new
desktops, find existing desktops, and share health status data and other information.
Port requirements

Conclusion
The Cloud Pod Architecture is a significant advancement in designing View solutions for an enterprise
organization by giving administrators visibility from regional and global perspectives. It also provides more
options when building out your functional requirements and logical design. The View Cloud Pod
Architecture will provide multi-site federated components with replicated content to provide locationaware delivery of content to reduce the latency to the source and provide flexibility for deployment by
leveraging on-premises implementation, as well as public and hybrid cloud options to match your current
or planned delivery model. Load balancing and other power features are baked into the design to build out
a more resilient, redundant infrastructure for your organization.

Dell Wyse Datacenter for VMware Horizon View Cloud Pod Architecture | v.6.5