Any way to limit linked clones to specific hosts?

[dregilley]

A little background.  Horizon 7.6  vCenter 6.5.  We are a large 911 center.  We have a 5 host cluster that runs both our servers and a new Horizon environment with 20 desktops for remote operations.  Not in production yet.

Unfortunately we only have 1Gbps vMotion networks and the latency when migrating servers is too great for our active server environments...a hot vMotion will trigger a failover to the DR site.  Due to that I have automatic DRS disabled.  When I create desktop pools it seems to just distribute them evenly across the hosts.  I am running into issues where it spins up a large number of desktops on an already busy host and I run into RAM issues.  I would like a way to specify 3 of the 5 hosts for VDI desktops and have it ignore the other two.  Preferably without having to re-cluster.

I am newish to Horizon so would greatly appreciate any guidance!

[BeekR]

Horizon looks at data stores and not at hosts unfortunately. So without changes you won't be able to do this.

[BenFB]

I would not recommend mixing VDI and server workloads on the same hosts. I've seen on too many occasions where this leads to poor performance of the VDI. Depending on how you are licensing the host that could be against the terms too.

If you are a 911 center and the servers or VMs are critical to safety you should be dedicating clusters to this. I would even be looking at Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA) for high availability.

[BeekR]

Agree, never mix backend and frontend workloads, their charateristics are too different to live together.

I must have missed that part of the question, didn't see that he was looking in doing that, I assumed he wanted to limit the hosts that get a linked clone pool.

[dregilley]

The purpose of limiting virtual desktops to hosts is to keep the workload separated while not removing the ability to use the hosts for other workloads in an emergency.  This is a tiny 20 license implementation of Horizon. 

Can't get new hardware - budget

Don't want to split cluster because I'd rather have the ability to use all 5 hosts for server workloads in the event of a loss of multiple hosts even if I don't have the intention of doing so.  VDI users are not mission critical as these are not daily use production 911 workstations.

Guess my only option is to vMotion them manually after creation.

[HussamRabaya]

simply create cluster for single host and use it for Horizon  or as others said create datastore mapped to singel host and use it for Horizon linked clone

[BenFB · Accepted solution]

If any of these systems are critical to life or safety then I really feel that you need to purchase the necessary hardware.

If that's not the case you could create DRS rules to pin the server and VDI to the hosts you want them to run on. You will just need to add VMs to the DRS groups after they are created. This will require enabling DRS but it seems like your best bet.

[dregilley]

This was my thought as well.  Was just curious if there was a way to do the same in the Horizon UI so it would compose them onto the hosts from the start.  Not a huge environment so not that much work.

Thanks!