Beginner - testing basic setup - how?

[jawohlnein]

I am a private person that bought a few refurbished Dell Wyse P25 zero thin clients. I just discovered zero clients and got really excited. I have worked in finance for many years as a mathematician (quant) devising machine learning to concoct trading strategies for the High Frequency Trading desk at large investment banks, hedge funds, etc. I dont understand why large companies dont use VMware VMs and thin clients much more? I am going to suggest this! But first I need to learn more, so I can answer questions from management. I want to have done my research and the best way to learn more is to setup a simple environment.

As I have understood it, these Teradici zero clients have no OS, only a firmware. So they connect to a VMware ESXi server which runs the VMs? Now I want to setup a basic configuration to try out some basic gaming/work with my girlfriend. What do I need? The text material is vast and difficult to orientate. Can someone give me some hints, so I now where to start reading?

Is this possible?

-Run a few VMs on my PC (Supermicro mobo, Xeon E3-1245 cpu, 32 GB RAM) using ESXi

-VM: Solaris 11.4 with passthrough to SAS LSI 2008 card with my ZFS raid so it can provide storage to all other VMs

-VM: Win7 with some old games, and passthrough to my Nvidia GTX1070 Ti

-VM: Win7 with same old games, passthrough to the built in graphics on the Xeon cpu

-Connect Teradici thin clients to the server and do some testing/gaming

Do I need more servers to do this? Databases? What is the simplest environment I need to do this? Is this called VDI?

[BenFB]

Some of your use cases are likely not possible (Gaming in a VM still has a ways to go). Possibly with full clones or vCenter VMs but not with linked clones or instant clones.

A Teradici Zero Client will typically require a Horizon View deployment in addition to ESXi which consists of at least one Windows server acting as the connection server to broker connections. Technically you could install the direct connect agent on a VM without a connection server but you need to be licensed for Horizon view. I would recommend some of the Horizon View Hands on Labs to familiarize yourself with the product. From there I would engage a VAR for additional demos and discussions.

[jawohlnein]

Aha! Progress! Thanks for the answer. So to try this out, I need to setup a ESXi environment with some VMs. I am familiar with ESXi and has used it earlier.

Then, to connect the Teradici zero clients, I need a "connection agent"? And that agent can be installed without "connection server"? But is it tricky to install the agent without the connection server? Are there Horizon view licenses for private users testing the software? And what is a VAR? Is it a sales rep? Thanx for your help, this saves a lot of time. If I just know where to start, I can dig myself. But I need a starting point, with high level overview knowledge.

[sjesse]

$200 for a bunch of licenses for a year for personal use.

https://www.vmug.com/Join/EVALExperience

[jawohlnein]

Thanx! So I would need these two products? Any else?
-VMware Horizon® Advanced Edition
-VMware vSphere® ESXi Enterprise Plus with Operations Management™ (6 CPU licenses)

[sjesse · Accepted solution]

You will also need vcenter as well, its a separate product, but its all 1 cost so you can try them all if you want. Vrealize operations and vrealize operations for horizon is something you may want to look at , its a monitoring tool for the virtual desktop environment. NSX is another options if your trying to see the different virtual desktop options, there are interesting things you can do with user based firewalls and micro-segmenting your virtual networks.. vRealize loginsight is another tool for monitoring, it captures all the logs in a single interface, it has dashboards you can setup for horizon. Basically everyone of those products they provide could be used in a production enviornment, so if your trying to see what's possible, I'd start with what your looking at then move to these. The only two enterpise options missing are AppVolumes and UEM. I'm hoping they add these somehow when they update the listing.

[jawohlnein]

Wow. That is a lot of stuff to look into. Thanks!

But, if I only want the simplest environment for my Teradici zero clients, what do I need then? ESXi and Horizon? And vcenter? What does it do? Horizon brokers connections, right?

I am not interested in monitoring traffic for me and my girl friend right now, that can wait.

[sjesse]

To test horizon you just need Horizon View installed on a Windows server, an Active Directory server, at least one ESXi server, and a vcenter server. You can do local storage for the vms if you wanted to, but if your installing something like freenas that works as well.

Look at this page

https://techzone.vmware.com/resource/horizon

[jawohlnein]

Ok, great! Now I now where to start. Thanks a lot!

I know how to use and setup VMware ESXi. I will run Solaris, Win7, Linux images. Solaris will be storing all data, using the bullet proof ZFS. The Linux version of ZFS is a bit buggy, so I prefer the Solaris ZFS for data storage.

I will install Horizon View on a Windows server (will check which Windows versions are supported)

I will setup an AD server.

I will setup an vcenter server.

And this is the absolute minimum to run Teradici zero clients, as I understood it. I will run everything on a four core Xeon E3-1245 with 32 GB RAM. Thanks again. I will report back in a few months how it did went.

[sjesse]

I suggest sharing the storage with NFS, if I remember right zfs and iscsi have a fragmenation issue, and you need to use one or the other two provide the storage to the ESXi host.

[jawohlnein]

I was thinking of using CIFS. That should work? I import the ZFS storage into Solaris, and share it out on the network with CIFS?

[sjesse]

CIFS won't work, if you passing most of the storage through to your Solaris box, you have 2 choices basically, NFS or ISCSI. iSCSI will let your create VMFS datastores, since it looks like the disk is a local disk. NFS lets you create datastores based on NFS exports. Look at this kb for the explainations of the different kinds of remote storage.

Networked Storage

Fibre channel over ethernet is another possiblity, but based on your description I doubt that is a possibility.

[jawohlnein]

Thanks again! You are the man! Ok, I will use NFS as you suggest. However, I want to setup a Solaris VM to share the storage to other VMs. In my PC I have two SSDs and also one LSI2008 sas card with a raidz3 in a jbod case. The LSI2008 card will only sometimes be used, when backupping data from the SSD disks. The jbod case is too loud, so it will often be shut down. The LSI2008 card will be pass through to the Solaris VM.

The main storage will be a 240GB SSD. On this SSD, I will install ESXi. And then create Solaris VM, and Linux VM, Windows7 VMs. All of the VMs will reside on the SSD disk, together with ESXi.

I also have a 500GB SSD which is a ZFS data storage disk. So this 500GB SSD will be shared with NFS to all VMs? So, Solaris VM needs exclusive acess to this 500GB ZFS data disk. And then Solaris can share out the data via NFS to the other VMs. And also, Solaris will share out the raidz3 with the LSI2008 card, via NFS to the other VMs. I will access all these VMs via Teradici zero clients.

Is this high level overview picture correctly understood by me?

I am going to follow this ESXi guide to setup a Solaris VM that shares the storage to other VMs via NFS.
https://hardforum.com/threads/opensolaris-derived-zfs-nas-san-omnios-openindiana-solaris-and-napp-it...
He writes:

"3.2 short how for my All-In-One concept:

-use a mainboard with Intel 3420 or 5520 chipset + one or two Xeons
-you need a second Disk-Controller, best are LSI 1068 or 2008 based SAS/SATA in IT-mode
(flash it to IT-mode, if you have a IR/Raid flashed one)
-Install esxi (onto a >= 32 GB boot drive, connected to sata in ahci mode)
-activate vti-d in mainboard bios
-activate pci-passthrough for this SAS controller in esxi, reboot
-use the remaining space of your boot drive as a local datastor, install a virtualized Nexenta/Solaris on this local datastore; add/ pass-through your SAS Controller to this VM
-connect all other disks to your SAS/Sata Controller. Nexenta/ Solaris will have real access to these disks due to pass-through.
-set this VM to autostart first and install vmware-tools
-create a pool, share it via NFS and CIFS for easy clone/move/save/backup/snap access from Windows or from console/midnight commander.
-import this NFS-Share as a NFS datastore within ESXi and store all other VMs like any Windows, Linux, Solaris or BSD on it
-share it also via CIFS for easy cloning/ backup of a VM's from your ZFS folder or via Windows previous version."