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45 Posts
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188136
January 2nd, 2013 19:00
Desktop Virtualization (vWorkspace) Hyper-V 2008R2/2012 Cluster
Hi,
I'm planning on using vWorkspace VDI farm with three Hyper-V servers, 2008R2 or 2012, in a cluster setup with live migration and shared storage. I was wondering if anyone in community has this type of setup and what are the experiences or issue that you came across during deployment?
thanks
Dejan
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DELL-Paul Fi
101 Posts
1
January 15th, 2013 07:00
Hi Dejan,
The main reasons for having a cluster would be if you have persistently assigned virtual desktops. This might be because you don't have roaming profile capability (which is built into vWorkspace) or your users want to install and personalise the desktops with their own applications, both of which I discourage because it adds value to these virtual desktops and then you need a cluster for HA and you have to think about backups. To me going down this route you end up losing lots of major benefits of VDI.
If your reason is for managing the hyper-v hosts then I would say that you still do not need a cluster, you might find this blog post useful.
Are the three hyper-v hosts only for the virtual desktops? Where are you thinking of hosting the vWorkspace Connection Brokers and perhaps more importantly the database?
Regards
Paul
DELL-Paul Fi
101 Posts
1
January 14th, 2013 14:00
Hi Dejan,
This is a very typical deployment scenario for hosting persistently assigned desktops and also if you are hosting the vWorkspace infrastructure components (Connection Brokers, SQL Server, Profile Server, Print etc) as you would want those highly available. For information, in a clustered environment you will also need SCVMM. If you don't need persistent desktops but pooled which is where the next available VM is assigned, profiles and applications are streamed in after the user logs in then you could make use of the excellent components in vWorkspace allowing you to reduce the complexity and cost of a virtual desktop deployment.
What are the reasons for placing your VDI virtual machines in a cluster?
Regards
Paul
dkgcb
45 Posts
0
January 14th, 2013 19:00
Hey Paul,
thanks for responding.
High Availability. I'm thinking about placing all virtual desktops in the cluster so when I have to patch and reboot servers I can just migrate machines to a different server without any down time. My worry was if the vWorkspace will work with this setup or not.
dkgcb
45 Posts
0
February 14th, 2013 19:00
Hi, Paul
Yeah sorry I have not gotten back we had a lot of stuff going on (Java vunerabilities), anyway I have three HP Blade c460 server with 192 GB of RAM but only 300GB of local disk space so I dont want to overfill the drives with images, but it might be enough for pilot of 50 virtual desktops. I think I will use one of these just as a Session host server so I have published apps and vdi to deliver.
I'm going to have to install the brokers and webaccess on the hyper-v boxes where the virtual desktops are going to be on. The reason is I would like to use Windows server 2012 but our infrastructure (VMware 4) is not ready yet to host 2012 virtual servers. If this does not work, I'm wondering if for now I can use mix of server 2008 r2 and 2012 with vworkspace? I'm thinking abot having webaccess and brokers on 2008 R2 and Hyper-v 2012, but they when the pilot is done, 2-3 months rebuild everything in Win 2012. We have MS SQL cluster is where the db is going to be.
I see your point about not having any persitent VM becasue of the backup and such but someone will request it, I bet.
I read the document above that you wrote and its great except when you get to the point of calling the users to get out of VMs so we can patch the server, I really dont want to call bunch of faculty/students that could be all over the world at 5:30pm on Friday when we are patching, that why I'm thinking about cluster or live migration feature in Windows 2012 .
thanks
Dejan