VMware Horizon Desktop as a Service on NetApp All Flash FAS

Transcription

1 Technical Report VMware Horizon Desktop as a Service on NetApp All Flash FAS Brian Casper, NetApp September 2015 TR-4450 Abstract VMware Horizon Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution that provides desktops either inside of an enterprise or through a cloud service provider. In conjunction with NetApp storage and management products, this solution can simplify management and deployment of DaaS. The NetApp All Flash FAS (AFF) solution eliminates common barriers to virtual desktop adoption and alleviates concerns about high storage costs.

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 Executive Summary Overview Target Audience Component Overview Server Resources Network Requirements NetApp Components Horizon Desktop-as-a-Service Platform Design Considerations Storage Separation Multi-Tenancy Cloning and Deduplication Conclusions References Version History Acknowledgements LIST OF TABLES Table 1) AFF8000 storage system technical specifications....7 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1) Horizon DaaS logical view (graphic supplied by VMware)....4 Figure 2) Clustered Data ONTAP VMware Horizon Desktop as a Service on NetApp All Flash FAS 2015 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

3 1 Executive Summary Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has continued to grow as a mechanism for providing user desktops within the enterprise. What started out as departmental or small-scale deployments for specific groups of users has blossomed into a set of tools and products that allow rapid replication and streamlined distribution of desktop images to large and varied user groups. To further develop these deployment models, DaaS solutions facilitate even easier VDI replication within secure multi-tenant environments by either using on-premises equipment or through an external service provider. VMware Horizon DaaS is one such product, and its implementation and features dovetail nicely with the capabilities and performance of NetApp storage products. The purpose of this document is to describe the components of a Horizon DaaS on NetApp FAS solution. We also discuss integration points with NetApp All Flash FAS for primary storage and network-attached storage (NAS) connections by the desktop images to secondary application storage. We also depict management of the VMware environment with the Horizon DaaS and NetApp Virtual Storage Console (VSC) and provide a brief discussion of performance. 1.1 Overview This document describes the deployment of VMware Horizon DaaS software on top of NetApp storage. NetApp tested the deployment of virtual machines (VMs) within this environment to demonstrate the provisioning and cloning capabilities of the clustered Data ONTAP operating system (OS). The goal was to simulate the usage experienced by an on-premises IT management group when deploying desktops to different user groups so as to provide a security layer between them. The multi-tenant capabilities of the Horizon DaaS system take advantage of similar capabilities available within clustered Data ONTAP, making the overall solution secure from end to end. In this study, the environment modeled a deployment in which all of the equipment lies within the local enterprise data center and the users reside in a corporate network. The VMware Horizon DaaS solution can also be operated by a cloud service provider (CSP) that owns and operates all of the server and storage equipment. Although discussion of the business case for such an arrangement is beyond the scope of this document, the relationship between the Horizon DaaS layer and the NetApp storage layer is equivalent in either type of deployment. The CSP model makes an even stronger case for strict multitenancy, but the deployment details do not change. This deployment uses techniques and configuration best practices described in previous NetApp VDI reference architectures. VMware Horizon DaaS is a framework for deploying VDI in a secure multi-tenant environment, much like VMware Horizon View is used for other VDI architectures. The mechanism for deploying the desktop images might differ among these solutions, but the end-user profile for the desktop user base is similar. Accordingly, we expect the workload characteristics to be similar across all VDI solutions. For further discussion of VMware VDI solution deployment with a deeper examination of All Flash FAS performance, refer to the NetApp All-Flash FAS Solution For Nonpersistent Desktops with VMware Horizon View or NetApp All-Flash FAS Solution for Persistent Desktops with VMware Horizon View reference architectures. For further discussion of DaaS deployment with the VMware Desktone platform, refer to Desktone DaaS on NetApp FAS Storage with Clustered Data ONTAP. 1.2 Target Audience This document describes the use of VMware Horizon DaaS on NetApp storage. The target audience for this document includes sales engineers, field consultants, professional services representatives, IT managers, partner engineering staff, and customers who are considering this solution. 3 VMware Horizon Desktop as a Service on NetApp All Flash FAS 2015 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

4 2 Component Overview This section describes the components necessary to construct a Horizon DaaS solution on NetApp storage. This infrastructure is typically located within a data center that is either on premises or with a CSP. Desktop access can be provided from a client device to the VM over a local or remote network. The Horizon DaaS environment is composed of four essential components. At the core of the infrastructure is a set of server resources that require storage access, with storage being the second component. Network resources then connect the physical subcomponents together. The final component is the Horizon DaaS platform that is layered on top of the other three physical components and provides the management infrastructure for deploying virtual desktops. Figure 1 shows the logical view of a Horizon DaaS deployment. The network topology, server configuration, and storage connections are depicted in this diagram. Figure 1) Horizon DaaS logical view (graphic supplied by VMware). 2.1 Server Resources The server infrastructure for a Horizon DaaS deployment requires at least two physical servers running VMware ESX. One physical server hosts the Horizon DaaS virtual appliances that are used for managing the system. These appliances includes the service provider management appliance, the resource manager appliance and one tenant appliance per tenant. Additional network resources for the Domain Name System (DNS), Microsoft Active Directory, the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), and so on are also necessary. One or more physical servers host the virtual desktop machines. Horizon DaaS appliances are designed for distributed computing and can scale to meet demand. To improve availability, it is a good design idea to enable high availability (HA) appliance pairs. Additional physical servers might be required to meet these needs, depending on the desired level of redundancy. 4 VMware Horizon Desktop as a Service on NetApp All Flash FAS 2015 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

5 Management Hosts The sizing requirements for physical servers should take into account the number of tenants that the environment hosts. The CPU, memory and storage requirements vary based upon this number. The following guidelines are useful starting points for determining the size of the management host: CPU. Each core supports 10 tenants. Memory. Each tenant requires 3.5GB of RAM on each Horizon DaaS management host. Storage. Each tenant requires 56GB of storage. Desktop Hosts The sizing requirements for the physical servers should take into account the number of virtual desktop machines operating in the tenant environment. The virtual desktop images are in shared storage. Therefore, the server equipment does not need more than a small internal disk to host the hypervisor OS. The following guidelines give an estimate of the sizing requirements for a virtual desktop host: CPU. Provide one physical core for every 10 virtual CPUs deployed. Memory. Allocate enough physical RAM to cover the aggregate of all running VM memory requirements. These results vary based on actual use cases. For example, power user applications might require more memory than knowledge workers do. Additional CPU cores might be required if the user workload is more CPU intensive. 2.2 Network Requirements Separation of network traffic is a basic design requirement for strict segregation between tenants in a DaaS environment. It is a best practice to use virtual LANs (VLANs) to enforce isolation of traffic on management, backbone, and other tenant networks. VMware vsphere distributed switches (VDS) and the Cisco Nexus 1000V can also be employed and are particularly useful in a distributed configuration in which multiple data center locations might be in use. To complete the network design, consider the following list of requirements: IPv6 connectivity is required for the Horizon DaaS appliance networks. NetApp recommends the use of a 10Gb Ethernet connection between the servers that host the virtual desktop machines and storage. Multiple 10GbE connections can be used to meet higher bandwidth requirements. Routers used in the configuration must support independent routing tables (VRFs) for continuing VLAN-tagged traffic so that each tenant remains isolated. 2.3 NetApp Components NetApp storage systems provide fast and efficient repositories for VMs and user data. The clustered Data ONTAP storage OS provides a consistent management interface and feature set across a variety of NetApp FAS storage devices and is an optimal solution for integration with VMware Horizon DaaS. NetApp All Flash FAS solutions are robust storage devices that provide best-in-class storage for VDI workloads. The NetApp VSC was developed to provide a seamless plug-in extension into the VMware vsphere management tool. This section describes in more detail the capabilities and benefits of these specific NetApp components. 5 VMware Horizon Desktop as a Service on NetApp All Flash FAS 2015 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

6 Clustered Data ONTAP VMware Horizon DaaS on clustered Data ONTAP leverages several NetApp technologies, resulting in higher performance, lower total cost of ownership, and tighter integration with the DaaS environment: Clustered Data ONTAP addresses the challenges facing your growing and dynamic business by extending the innovation of NetApp Data ONTAP. Our unified cluster architecture scales and adapts to your changing needs, reducing risk and cost. Clustered Data ONTAP is designed to eliminate downtime, allowing you to service your infrastructure without disrupting access to user data and applications, even during regular business hours. Proven operational efficiency helps you simplify your overall storage environment and manage storage infrastructure at scale by automating important processes and increasing productivity. You can add capacity as you grow across both SAN and NAS environments without reconfiguring running applications. We let you start small and grow big without the disruptive hardware upgrades required by other storage vendors. Clustered Data ONTAP provides up to 24 storage controllers or nodes managed as a single logical pool so that your operations can scale more easily. NetApp supports one of the broadest set of storage protocols and is the only provider that can deliver both SAN and NAS data access from a single, unified scale-out platform. Some of the key benefits that NetApp technologies provide to this solution are: Unified architecture. You can recover significant operational cost savings with unified scale-up and scale-out capabilities in cloud-scale deployments of Horizon DaaS platforms. Storage efficiency. You can significantly reduce costs by using NetApp RAID DP technology, thin provisioning, inline compression, inline zero elimination, deduplication, thin replication, and NetApp FlexVol volumes. Seamless scalability (performance and capacity). When requirements and demands change, you can scaled up, scale down, or scale out a given cluster based on performance and capacity requirements, physical limitations, best practices, data center power and cooling availability, and so on. This capability includes vertical as well as horizontal scaling. Performance and NetApp Virtual Storage Tiering. You can enhance user experiences with NetApp Virtual Storage Tiers and write I/O optimization, which strongly complement the storage-efficiency capabilities of NetApp systems. Operational agility, nondisruptive operations, and data mobility. NetApp technologies enhance Horizon DaaS solution management with tight platform integration and storage mobility capabilities. NetApp FlexClone technology. The Horizon DaaS platform leverages FlexClone to efficiently clone virtual desktop images in the storage tier. This feature offloads the task from the typically CPU- and memory-intensive process required to handle the cloning process in the virtualization compute tier. Deduplication. Deduplication frequently can reduce storage utilization for virtual desktop environments by over 90%. It also enhances related caching and replication capabilities by only storing or replicating a single instance of each replica block. NetApp OnCommand suite. The OnCommand suite provides centralized storage management and monitoring. Data protection. NetApp technologies enhance local and remote protection of the Horizon DaaS management platform, virtual desktop OS data, and user data, with very low overhead for both cost and operations. NetApp Snapshot copies. This NetApp technology protects and retrieves deleted files easily with the capability to instantaneously revert file systems to a previous point in time. This allows quick recovery from application corruption issues. NetApp SnapMirror data replication software. This NetApp technology replicates virtual desktop and user content between storage systems in a thin and deduplicated format. 6 VMware Horizon Desktop as a Service on NetApp All Flash FAS 2015 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

7 For more information about NetApp clustered Data ONTAP, refer to Clustered Data ONTAP Operating System. All Flash FAS Built on more than 20 years of innovation, Data ONTAP has evolved to meet the changing needs of customers and to help drive their success. Clustered Data ONTAP provides a rich set of data management features and clustering for scale-out, operational efficiency, and nondisruptive operations. It also offers customers one of the most compelling value propositions in the industry. The IT landscape is undergoing a fundamental shift to IT as a service. This model that requires a pool of compute, network, and storage resources to serve a wide range of applications and deliver a wide range of services. Innovations such as clustered Data ONTAP are fueling this revolution. Outstanding Performance The NetApp All Flash FAS solution shares the same unified storage architecture, Data ONTAP OS, management interface, rich data services, and advanced feature set as the rest of the fabric-attached storage (FAS) product families. This innovative combination of all-flash media with Data ONTAP delivers the consistent low latency and high IOPS of all-flash storage with the industry-leading clustered Data ONTAP OS. It also offers proven enterprise availability, reliability, and scalability; storage efficiency proven in thousands of VDI deployments; unified storage with multiprotocol access; advanced data services; and operational agility through tight application integrations. AFF8000 Technical Specifications Table 1 provides the technical specifications for the four AFF8000 series storage systems, AFF8080 EX, AFF8060, AFF8040, and AFF8020. Note: All data in Table 1 applies to active-active, dual-controller configurations. Table 1) AFF8000 storage system technical specifications. Features AFF8080 EX AFF8060 AFF8040 AFF8020 Maximum raw capacity with solidstate drives (SSDs) Maximum number of SSDs 384TB 384TB 384TB 384TB Controller form factor Dual-enclosure HA Two controllers and two I/O expansion modules (IOXMs) in two 6U chassis A total of 12U or single-enclosure HA Two controllers in a single 6U chassis Dual-enclosure HA Two controllers and two IOXMs in two 6U chassis A total of 12U or single-enclosure HA Two controllers in a single 6U chassis Single-enclosure HA Two controllers in a single 6U chassis Single-enclosure HA Two controllers in a single 3U chassis Memory 256GB 128GB 64GB 48GB 7 VMware Horizon Desktop as a Service on NetApp All Flash FAS 2015 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

8 Features AFF8080 EX AFF8060 AFF8040 AFF8020 NVRAM 32GB 16GB 16GB 8GB PCIe expansion slots Onboard I/O: UTA2 (10GbE/FCoE, 16Gb FC) Onboard I/O: 10GbE Onboard I/O: GbE Onboard I/O: 6Gb SAS Optical SAS support Yes Yes Yes Yes Storage networking supported OS version FC, FCoE, iscsi, NFS, pnfs, CIFS/SMB, HTTP, FTP AFF8080 EX: Data ONTAP RC1 or later, AFF8060, AFF8040, AFF8020 Data ONTAP RC2 or later Scale-Out Data centers require agility. In a data center, each storage controller has CPU, memory, and disk shelf limits. The ability to scale out means that, as your storage environment grows, you can seamlessly add additional controllers to the resource pool that reside on a shared storage infrastructure. You can also seamlessly and nondisruptively move host and client connections as well as datastores to anywhere within the resource pool. The benefits of scale-out include: Nondisruptive operations The ability to keep adding thousands of users to the virtual desktop environment without downtime Operational simplicity and flexibility As Figure 2 shows, clustered Data ONTAP allows you to meet the scalability requirements of your storage environment. A clustered Data ONTAP system can scale up to 24 nodes, depending on the platform and protocol, and can contain different disk types and controller models in the same storage cluster. 8 VMware Horizon Desktop as a Service on NetApp All Flash FAS 2015 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

9 Figure 2) Clustered Data ONTAP. Note: The storage virtual machines (SVMs) referred to in Figure 2 were formerly called Vservers. Nondisruptive Operations The move to shared infrastructure has made it nearly impossible to schedule downtime for routine maintenance. NetApp clustered Data ONTAP is designed to eliminate the planned downtime that is usually needed for maintenance and lifecycle operations as well as the unplanned downtime caused by hardware and software failures. Three standard tools make this elimination of downtime possible: NetApp DataMotion data migration software for volumes (vol move) allows you to move data volumes from one aggregate to another on the same or on a different cluster node. Logical interface (LIF) migrate allows you to virtualize the physical Ethernet interfaces in clustered Data ONTAP. LIF migrate lets you move LIFs from one network port to another on the same or on a different cluster node. Aggregate relocate (ARL) allows you to transfer complete aggregates from one controller in an HA pair to the other without data movement. Used individually and in combination, these tools help you to nondisruptively perform a wide range of operations, from moving a volume from a faster to a slower disk to a complete controller and storage technology refresh. As storage nodes are added to the system, all physical resources CPUs, cache memory, network I/O bandwidth, and disk I/O bandwidth can easily be kept in balance. Clustered Data ONTAP systems enable users to: Add or remove storage shelves (over 23PB in an 8-node cluster and up to 69PB in a 24-node cluster) Move data between storage controllers and tiers of storage without disrupting users and applications Dynamically assign, promote, and retire storage, while providing continuous access to data as administrators upgrade or replace storage These capabilities allow administrators to increase capacity while balancing workloads. Administrators can also reduce or eliminate storage I/O hot spots without remounting shares, modifying client settings, or stopping any applications that are running. Availability A shared storage infrastructure can provide services to thousands of virtual desktops. In such environments, downtime is not an option. The NetApp All Flash FAS solution eliminates sources of downtime and protects critical data against disaster through two key features: 9 VMware Horizon Desktop as a Service on NetApp All Flash FAS 2015 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

10 High availability. A NetApp HA pair provides seamless failover to its partner in the case of hardware failure. Each of the two identical storage controllers in the HA pair configuration serves data independently during normal operation. During individual storage-controller failure, the data service process is transferred from the failed storage controller to the surviving partner. NetApp RAID DP data protection technology. Data protection is critical during any virtualized desktop deployment because any RAID failure might disconnect hundreds to thousands of end users from their desktops, resulting in lost productivity. RAID DP provides performance comparable to that of RAID 10 and yet requires fewer disks. RAID DP provides protection against double-disk failure, in contrast to RAID 5, which can protect against only one disk failure per RAID group. RAID DP in effect provides RAID 10 performance and protection at a RAID 5 price point. Optimized Writes The NetApp WAFL (Write Anywhere File Layout) file system enables NetApp to process writes efficiently. When the Data ONTAP OS receives an I/O, it holds the I/O in memory and protects it with a log copy in battery-backed NVRAM. It then sends back an acknowledgement, notifying the sender that the write was committed. Acknowledging the write before writing to storage allows Data ONTAP to perform many functions that optimize the data layout for optimal write-write coalescing. Before being written to storage, I/Os are coalesced into larger blocks, because larger sequential blocks require fewer CPU resources for each operation. Enhancing Flash Data ONTAP and FAS systems have leveraged flash technologies since 2009 and have supported SSDs since This relatively long experience in dealing with flash has allowed NetApp to fine tune Data ONTAP features to optimize SSD performance and enhance flash media endurance. Data ONTAP acknowledges writes after they are in DRAM and logged to NVRAM. This approach means that SSDs are not in the critical write path. Therefore, write latencies are very low. Data ONTAP also enables efficient use of SSDs when destaging write memory buffers by coalescing writes into a single sequential stripe across all SSDs at once. Data ONTAP writes to free space whenever possible, minimizing overwrites for every dataset, not just for deduplicated or compressed data. This wear-leveling feature of Data ONTAP is native to the architecture, and it also leverages the wearleveling and garbage-collection algorithms built into the SSDs to extend the life of the devices. Therefore, NetApp provides up to a five-year warranty with all SSDs (a three-year standard warranty, plus an offer for an additional two-year extended warranty with no restrictions on the number of drive writes). The parallelism built into Data ONTAP, combined with the multicore CPUs and large system memories in the FAS8000 storage controllers, takes full advantage of SSD performance. This combination has also powered the test results described in this document. For more information about NetApp All Flash FAS systems, refer to NetApp All Flash FAS. Virtual Storage Console The NetApp VSC is a plug-in that provides integrated, comprehensive storage management for VMware infrastructure within the single pane of glass of the VMware vsphere Web Client. The VSC allows VMware administrators to perform discovery, health monitoring, capacity management, provisioning, cloning, optimization, backups, restores, and disaster recovery without affecting any policies that a storage administrator might have created. Functionalities such as deduplication and thin provisioning of datastores, rapid cloning of VMs, near-instant VM backups, granular VM restores, and integration into storage disaster recovery solutions are at the VMware administrator s fingertips without the intervention of storage administrators. VMware Horizon DaaS is specifically engineered to use the provisioning and cloning capability of the VSC programmatic interfaces. When properly configured, this seamless integration allows the rapid 10 VMware Horizon Desktop as a Service on NetApp All Flash FAS 2015 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

11 deployment of new virtual desktop images while leveraging offloaded image replication capabilities within the storage array. For more information about the VSC, refer to NetApp Virtual Storage Console. The VSC is available to all customers through the NetApp Support site. 2.4 Horizon Desktop-as-a-Service Platform The Horizon DaaS platform is the only virtual desktop solution that is designed specifically for service providers, with many features designed specifically for operating as a service in the cloud. The feature list is long, but the top five features that set Horizon DaaS apart are: Multi-tenancy. The Horizon DaaS platform is the only multi-tenant VDI solution on the market. This feature allows service providers to manage numerous tenants across multiple data centers from a single management platform, eliminating the need for the per-tenant management platforms of traditional VDI solutions. Elastic scalability. The Horizon DaaS Enterprise Center web console enables tenant administrators to quickly and easily provision virtual desktops for end users based on new or existing desktop images. The tight integration of Horizon DaaS with NetApp FlexClone technology offloads the virtual desktop provisioning process from the tenant host to the storage controllers, significantly reducing deployment time and any effect on tenant host CPU and memory resources. Enterprise integration. The Horizon DaaS platform integrates with the tenant s internal IT infrastructure and leverages the tenant s Active Directory service to control access to the virtual desktops. In addition, it enforces group policies, which allows administrators to control the behavior of the virtual desktops. Cost-effective model. The scale of the solution allows service providers to share resources across multiple tenants, reducing the financial burden and distributing the costs across tenants. Integration with NetApp technologies such as FlexClone, All Flash FAS, deduplication, inline compression, SVMs, Snapshot copies, and SnapMirror further drives down costs while increasing performance, efficiency, and flexibility. Implementing cloud-based virtual desktops for numerous tenants on traditional VDI platforms is highly cost-prohibitive. Horizon DaaS licensing is more competitive than the traditional VDI licensing offered by traditional enterprise VDI solutions, most of which require a separate siloed deployment for each tenant. Tiered role separation. There are clearly defined administrative boundaries for service provider administrators, tenant administrators, and end users that are separated by the web portal for each role. The Horizon DaaS platform consists of two distinct tiers: enterprise and service provider. Separating the enterprise and service-provider tiers is the key to enabling multi-tenancy VDI for DaaS. It allows enterprises to manage virtual desktop environments that are supported by physical resources owned and maintained by a third party. Service providers benefit from optimizing use of their data center assets while offering a new, highly scalable, multi-tenant, value-added service to customers. Organizations that use the Horizon DaaS on NetApp solution benefit from several key advantages over the traditional VDI and terminal server approach, including: No upfront capex costs No infrastructure to manage; no server hardware; and no data center, power, and cooling costs Fully provisioned Windows virtual desktops, rather than shared sessions on a single server Access to virtual desktops in the cloud from any device, rather than shared terminal service sessions that lead to additional application compatibility issues A lower-cost model The Horizon DaaS platform enables enterprises to quickly realize the full potential and benefits associated with VDI environments, including simpler deployment; improved management, security, and 11 VMware Horizon Desktop as a Service on NetApp All Flash FAS 2015 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

12 compliance; and superior end-user productivity). Enterprises can reap these benefits without the capital expense and complicated systems integration that are required to build and deploy a customized internal solution. This platform offers enterprises the flexibility to centrally deploy, manage, and update virtual desktops on an elastic environment for a geographically dispersed workforce. The Horizon DaaS platform has been designed to tightly integrate with NetApp storage features to provide a highly manageable, efficient, and cost-effective cloud solution. VMware leverages key NetApp technologies, such as NetApp FlexClone, deduplication, and more, to provide the performance and efficiency criteria mandated by today s VDI-based infrastructure deployments. The technical differentiators of Horizon DaaS including patents for cloud hosting desktops, provisioned virtual computing, multi-tenant data center design, and virtual computing services network, among others come to life in the Horizon DaaS platform. These differentiators can be seen in the four major components of Horizon DaaS: Resource manager. Service providers use the resource manager to manage both infrastructure capacity and tenant entitlement. Providers can define which desktop options are available to tenants for purchase, including Windows 7, Windows Server [hosted personal desktop], Windows XP, and Linux. They can also define how much memory and how many CPU resources are allocated to a particular virtual desktop, whether a desktop is persistent or dynamic, and whether the customer is allowed to choose between these two options. Providers can then manage the capacity for each physical host, including the ratio of virtual to physical machines and the amount of memory overallocation. Service providers must also choose whether to share a host or to dedicate compute resources to the virtual desktop. This innovative feature allows providers to offer Windows 7 virtual desktops while remaining in compliance with Microsoft. Only Desktone supports both models: either sharing hosts for Windows Server (hosted personal desktop) and Linux desktops or dedicating a host for a cloudhosted Windows 7 desktop. Based on the desktops that a tenant chooses, the Horizon DaaS platform also calculates how much of a resource, such as storage and compute, providers must have to meet the tenant s needs. Providers can see whether they have enough compute resources assigned to the tenant and enough capacity in the service grid overall to meet tenant needs. The resource manager leverages NetApp FlexClone technology to rapidly deploy new virtual desktops on thin-provisioned storage without affecting the CPU and memory utilization of the host platform. This capability makes the desktop provisioning process very fast and efficient. With the resource manager, service providers provision the tenant by registering it, providing a unique password, uploading a custom look and feel, and assigning a unique VLAN. The Horizon DaaS platform then automatically configures an access manager and a desktop manager specific to the particular tenant. Access manager. The access manager is the front end that tenants use to manage the connection broker for mapping users to desktops. It provides the portal access by which the customer s users connect to their desktops. Desktop manager. Each customer uses its own desktop manager to provision pools of desktops and to continuously monitor and manage the desktop session state. Service grid backbone. This feature resides between the service provider (that is, the resource manager) and the tenant (that is, the desktop manager and access manager) layers. In this technology, which is unique to the Horizon DaaS platform and is critical to service provider success, the resource manager resides in both the service provider network and the service grid backbone. Likewise, the access and desktop managers reside in both the tenant network and the service grid backbone. Network packets cannot cross the network, but the address space used by the service provider and the tenant can be identical without any issues. VMware built this product as a nonroutable network so that both the service provider and the tenant can run the same subnet IP ranges without conflict. 12 VMware Horizon Desktop as a Service on NetApp All Flash FAS 2015 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

13 The service grid backbone also contributes to the comprehensive security of the Horizon DaaS platform. Service providers and tenants cannot bridge into each other s networks. However, they can still communicate with each other because the tenant appliances (access manager and desktop manager) and the service provider appliance (resource manager) are dual-homed on the nonroutable network. 3 Design Considerations When designing a Horizon DaaS environment, you should consider several integration points between the software and hardware platform to create a secure and robust design that meets performance and availability goals. This section describes some of the more advanced features available within the ESX and storage architecture. 3.1 Storage Separation Superior performance in VDI solutions has been achieved by deploying NetApp All Flash FAS devices as the primary storage for VM desktop images. The efficiencies gained with cloning and deduplication make this configuration an excellent choice for these workloads. In this configuration, desktop VMs boot from the fastest possible media and access to the OS is optimized. Traditional spinning media is a cost-effective way to provide shared access to application data for the users of these VMs. Shared storage network protocols such as NFS and SMB can be configured on NetApp storage to serve up storage space for application and other user data. 3.2 Multi-Tenancy Clustered Data ONTAP is inherently a multi-tenant storage OS. It is possible to have a single partition that represents the resources of the entire cluster or to have multiple partitions that are assigned specific subsets of cluster resources. These secure virtual storage partitions are known as SVMs. Multiple tenants can be hosted simultaneously on a single Data ONTAP cluster. You can create a discrete volume for each individual tenant and a unique SVM to manage access from a desired set of tenant VMs to their own designated pool of storage. 3.3 Cloning and Deduplication NetApp clustered Data ONTAP provides a set of data management features that the Horizon DaaS layer uses to promote storage efficiency. In the standard workflow for deploying desktops, an administrator creates a gold pattern VM that is installed with the desired OS, applications, and other customizations needed by the end user. You can create additional clones of the gold pattern VM on demand. This process uses NetApp FlexClone technology to rapidly provision a copy of the VM. Because the data from the master is initially identical to each clone, these images are deployed without a forced block copy and are completed in a matter of seconds. All of this work is handled by the storage system, which offloads the work from the CPU on the host server. Additional deduplication of data residing in the storage volumes occurs over time. Deduplication often reduces storage utilization by rates of over 90% for virtual desktop environments. It also enhances related caching and replication capabilities by only storing or replicating a single instance of each replica block. The storage is scanned, and any identical blocks that are found are collapsed into a single block. Pointer references are updated so that only one copy of data exists in the volume. Others copies are returned to the free block pool. 13 VMware Horizon Desktop as a Service on NetApp All Flash FAS 2015 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

14 4 Conclusions VMware Horizon DaaS is a viable solution for managing the deployment of virtual desktop images, and NetApp storage provides compelling features to effectively and efficiently support Horizon DaaS environments. To configure a successful Horizon DaaS environment, you must take into account many different design elements. Reference guides for VDI environments with VMware on NetApp are available and provide additional information that is beyond the scope of this paper. For assistance in designing and configuring your Horizon DaaS environment, contact VMware and/or NetApp professional services. References The following references were used in this technical report: NetApp All Flash FAS Solution for Nonpersistent Desktops with VMware Horizon View NetApp All Flash FAS Solution for Persistent Desktops with VMware Horizon View Desktone DaaS on NetApp FAS Storage with Clustered Data ONTAP Clustered Data ONTAP Operating System VMware vsphere 5 on NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP NetApp All Flash FAS NetApp Virtual Storage Console for VMware vsphere Version History Version Date Document Version History Version 1.0 September 2015 Initial release Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Chris Gebhardt, Scott Gentry, Ganesh Kamath and Bhumik Patel (VMware) for their contributions to this document. 14 VMware Horizon Desktop as a Service on NetApp All Flash FAS 2015 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

15 Refer to the Interoperability Matrix Tool (IMT) on the NetApp Support site to validate that the exact product and feature versions described in this document are supported for your specific environment. The NetApp IMT defines the product components and versions that can be used to construct configurations that are supported by NetApp. Specific results depend on each customer's installation in accordance with published specifications. Copyright Information Copyright NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S. No part of this document covered by copyright may be reproduced in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or storage in an electronic retrieval system without prior written permission of the copyright owner. Software derived from copyrighted NetApp material is subject to the following license and disclaimer: THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY NETAPP "AS IS" AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, WHICH ARE HEREBY DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL NETAPP BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. NetApp reserves the right to change any products described herein at any time, and without notice. NetApp assumes no responsibility or liability arising from the use of products described herein, except as expressly agreed to in writing by NetApp. The use or purchase of this product does not convey a license under any patent rights, trademark rights, or any other intellectual property rights of NetApp. The product described in this manual may be protected by one or more U.S. patents, foreign patents, or pending applications. RESTRICTED RIGHTS LEGEND: Use, duplication, or disclosure by the government is subject to restrictions as set forth in subparagraph (c)(1)(ii) of the Rights in Technical Data and Computer Software clause at DFARS (October 1988) and FAR (June 1987). Trademark Information NetApp, the NetApp logo, Go Further, Faster, AltaVault, ASUP, AutoSupport, Campaign Express, Cloud ONTAP, Clustered Data ONTAP, Customer Fitness, Data ONTAP, DataMotion, Fitness, Flash Accel, Flash Cache, Flash Pool, FlashRay, FlexArray, FlexCache, FlexClone, FlexPod, FlexScale, FlexShare, FlexVol, FPolicy, GetSuccessful, LockVault, Manage ONTAP, Mars, MetroCluster, MultiStore, NetApp Insight, OnCommand, ONTAP, ONTAPI, RAID DP, RAID-TEC, SANtricity, SecureShare, Simplicity, Simulate ONTAP, SnapCenter, Snap Creator, SnapCopy, SnapDrive, SnapIntegrator, SnapLock, SnapManager, SnapMirror, SnapMover, SnapProtect, SnapRestore, Snapshot, SnapValidator, SnapVault, StorageGRID, Tech OnTap, Unbound Cloud, WAFL and other names are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. A current list of NetApp trademarks is available on the web at TR VMware Horizon Desktop as a Service on NetApp All Flash FAS 2015 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.