HI all,
We've been running VIEW for a couple of years now and am about to perform the annual upgrade ( from 5.1.1 to 5.2) and I am considering upgrading the local storage on the hosts with either 15K disks with 1GB of FBWC or even SSD and then utilizing Local datastores for the replicas and Linked clones. However I have spent the past couple of days trawling through the literature and I'm still confused how to do this and if it is possible ......
I am currently running 3 hosts in a cluster with an iSCSI connected SAN. I normally operate just the one Floating desktop pool (i.e. Stateless) and only ever utilize Linked clones with everything sitting on the SAN ( clones, replicas, user data and golden image). However we have experienced performance issues with that ( the SAN, in particular, is heavily used in other applications) and I was hoping to try moving the bulk of the VIEW desktop I/O to the local host storage. From the document "Reference Architecture for Stateless Virtual Desktops on Local Solid-State Storage with Vmware View 5" it seems it is possible.
However page 23 of documentation suggest it can be done by selecting all the local host SSD datastores on the cluster, whereas other documentation and comments on this forum suggest it is only possible to do this with standalone hosts ( I may have misunderstood that): which suggests that I would need to set up 3 pools - one for each host. I have no problem using hosts ( HA & DRS are not particularity required in our situation), but would this then mean my users would have to select a Pool each time rather than just being automatically connected they are at the moment ( my users only ever need access to one pool). Of course I could get round that bysplitting my users into 3 corresponding AD groups ( one entitlement to each pool) but that is then additional complexity.
When I create a TEST pool on my current setup that is set to only use the local datastores on my 3 hosts ( each host has sufficient storage at the moment for a small test pool), it never gets further than creating the replica ( or in some cases multiple replicas in each host!). So where am I going wrong ? Should Ihave HA and automatic DRS off ? Or is this something that is only possible with 5.2 ? Does it only work with SSDs ? Is my current local storage too slow and it is timing out on clone creation (It does take 30 minutes plus to do one replica onto local storage with my current hardware) ?
Of course I could just upgrade my SAN infrastructure to SSD and Fibre, but that is far to expensive option for me at the moment. It is expensive enough upgrading the disks, so I just want to be sure of my options before doing so.
Thanks