Design and Deployment Considerations

Now that we have provided a comprehensive overview of the different components of VMware Horizon in the first couple of chapters, in this chapter, we are going to concentrate on how to put those components to use by introducing you to some of the design and deployment techniques that you need to consider when undertaking your VMware Horizon project.

First, we are going to discuss techniques that you can use to prove the technology and understand how it needs to work inside your business, starting with how to assess your current environment and then how to use this information to design your Horizon deployment.

Once you fully understand what it is you need to achieve for the business, we will then take a deeper dive into the design elements of your Horizon solution, including, but not limited to, ESXi host design, memory and CPU allocations for virtual desktops, storage considerations, clients, and other best practices and tips.

We are going to look at both the business and the technical elements of a project, and then discuss each one and see how it fits into the overall project. To make this easier and more logical, we will break these down into three distinct project phases, as shown in the following diagram:

In the following sections, we are going to explore and discuss these three phases in more detail.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Phase I – Project definition
• Phase II – Proving the technology
• Phase III – Designing a production environment
• Technology choices
• Horizon View pod and block architecture
• Cloud Pod Architecture
• vSphere design for Horizon View
• Horizon View design specifics
• Supporting infrastructure design
• Printing
• Thin clients and other endpoint devices
• Desktop design considerations
• Example solution scenario