VCAP5-DTA: Section 1: Objective 1.1

[Section 1 – Deploy View Installations and Upgrade Existing Deployments]

1. Objective 1.1 – Deploy Highly Available View Installations:
   • Configure highly available connectivity to the View environment
   • Configure stateful and stateless load balancing for a View implementation
   • Implement vSphere cluster isolation and High Availability rules
   • Configure a View implementation with multiple vCenter Servers

Aiding documents: VMware Horizon View Architecture Planning | VMware Horizon View Installation

Configure highly available connectivity to the View environment / Configure stateful and stateless load balancing for a View implementation

I recommend reading the architecture planning document and keep it close because the purpose of that document is get us familiarized with the components and capabilities of VMware Horizon View and give us the edge to grasp identifying requirements for enterprises to deliver desktops and applications in a secure and efficient manner.

Now a high available View environment means that all components of the View environment must be identified and must be categorized in terms _what_is_the_effect_if_this_fails? and the effect is on users not on the administrators, because administrators do not nag on themselves when resolving their own problems but end users can me efficient at nagging and I believe they practice this skill in their subconscious ;-).

I will not elaborate on the role of each component as this can be read in the architecture documentation but I will simply enumerate the components so that to identify how each is made high available:

• View Components:
  • Client Device / View Client -> no high availability unless you’d like to put a second terminal for each user to connect from.
  • View Connection Server / View Portal -> multiple connection servers with replica servers load balanced via a hardware/virtual application aware load balancers, or you can use DNS round robin but its very unprofessional to use this in a production environment.
  • View Agent / View Desktop -> Since this is a virtual machine, this will be made high available via the vSphere HA.
  • View Composer -> This depends on whether you’re going to stick it to the vCenter server or perform a standalone installation, I haven’t found much on best practices regarding high availability for this role but from my point of view the virtual machine which will be protected via vSphere HA is high available now should you like to extend this high availability you can place the Composer database on a cluster SQL server.
  • View Transfer Server -> Install multiple View Transfer servers.
  • View Security Server -> Install multiple View Security Servers and load balance them at the DMZ.
• View Components Dependencies:
  • vSphere Components:
    • vCenter Server -> Either stick to making it a virtual machine and vSphere HA will handle it, otherwise you need to implement vCenter Heartbeat.
    • ESXi hosts ->  Once clustered the hosts will be eligible to enable vSphere HA.
    • Datastores / Storage -> A decent storage with two controllers and a good RAID level protection.
  • Windows Active Directory Services -> You should have at least two Active Directory servers, the primary domain controller and a secondary domain controller.
  • DNS -> You need multiple DNS servers, in case using Windows Server DNS role make sure you’ve configured your DNS server to keep its data in Active Directory.

Implement vSphere cluster isolation and High Availability rules / Configure a View implementation with multiple vCenter Servers

I will continue with these tomorrow…