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Lieven
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App Volumes and multiple virtual datacenters

I have a setup with a central vCenter and multiple physical datacenters connected to that central vCenter. Each physical datacenter is configured as a virtual datacenter within this central vCenter. My App Volumes servers are located in the central datacenter.

When I configure the default storage location for App Volumes I see all the datastores that my vCenter sees and can choose one of them to be the default storage location.

However, when I create an appstack, I can only choose between the datastores located in the same datacenter as the datastores chosen for the default storage location.

I actually want to create an appstack located on a datastore in a remote datacenter from my central app volumes infrastructure. How would I best accomplish this?

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Lieven
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With Storage Groups, I am able to replicate all appstacks from the central datacenter to the remote datacenters. This however does not give me the flexibility to have some appstacks only available in a remote datacenter.

When I assign an appstack to a Virtual Machine located in a remote datacenter, how can I control from which datastore(s) App Volumes will take the appstack and attach it to the Virtual Machine. I want to be able to tell App Volumes to attach the appstack from a datastore which is local to the Virtual Machine.

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matthiasFF
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As far as my testing goes, this doesn't work with storage groups. I would love a solution for this as well.

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snapmatt
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Contributor

Just to make sure I'm not missing some critical detail, is there any reason that vSphere Client couldn’t simply be using to copy the AppStack and metadata from one datastore to the other?


If all of these AppStacks were in the Storage Group (with auto-import turned on but not auto-replicate), they could always just manually copy the VMDKs where they wanted it and then after a while it will get noticed by the App Volumes Manager (since all datastores in the storage group will get auto-import). Alternatively, after copying the AppStack manually you could immediately use the “Import” option to make the App Volumes Manager aware of the new volume. If there is an existing AppStack assignment it will also apply to the AppStack on the new datastore. Also it possible to manually copy the VMDK + metadata manually from one datastore to another datastore and use the Import button to make the AppVolumes Manager aware of it even without Storage Groups.

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snapmatt
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Also if the virtual machines are located on the same datastores as the AppStacks, you can add all the datastores into a Storage Group with auto-replication turned on, turn on the "Mount-on-local" option in Configuration -> Hypervisor and we'll use the AppStack located on the same datastore as the virtual desktop itself is located on. That might be the simplest solution and won't require any manual steps.

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Lieven
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In theory that should work. But having the VDIs on the same datastore as your appstacks is against best practices because your IOPS pattern is clearly different.

Also this requires you to have copies of your appstacks on all of the VDI datastores, which is a waste of space.

VMware should come up with a more intelligent and flexible way of creating, distributing and assigning appstacks.

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Lieven
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Question: "Mount-on-local" does this refer to local ESXi datastores or the same (SAN) datastore the VDI resides on?

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