Adding a VDI enthronement to an existing vSphere deployment

[jfoutwest]

We are currently running vCenter Standard in a clustered two blade vSphere HA/DRS environment. The cluster currently is managing 15 VM's, a combination of Windows Servers and VMware vApps. Can we add ~6 VDI desktops and/or a Workspace deployment to this existing vCenter Server / vSphere environment?

[RyanH84]

There are many implications that need to be considered before you go ahead and do this. The number one advice that is generally given is to not mix your VDI workloads with your Production server workloads.I'm fairly confident that the license you obtain for View is only meant to license desktop workloads and I'm not sure in such a small environment how that would work entirely.

For something this small scale it might not hurt too badly. It is a very open ended question in my opinion and depends entirely on how you are planning on implementing View. What features of View are you intending on using to get benefit from?

[jfoutwest]

The use case would be to develop a solution that can publish six applications out to  eight end users. We currently have two servers running VM's, with 50% compute capacity still available. Without purchasing additional hardware can we deploy a View/Workspace solution (we have a View Enterprise license)?  Would this View Enterprise licenses allow us to continue to use the existing 5.5 vCenter  server to manage both the server VM's and the View/Workspace solution?

[kgsivan · Accepted solution]

Such design is not recommended for the large scale/ production indeed.

But considering the given small scale use case, you should be safe to proceed and there should not be any technical implication, provided sufficient CPU/Memory/Storage/and Ethernet resources are available and Network/Storage IO bandwidths are not affected even in peak usage.

In your case, I would suggest to create resource pools at vSphere and control the resources share wisely, and deploy VDI VMs in a separate resource pool. If there is a provision for dedicated network uplink for those VMs, that should be leveraged.

Hope this helps