Pool Design

[tomtom1]

Hi, I know Pool's are used to access VMs. But how should one design Pool, it is not exact science but more of art of understanding users, but there has to be some document or some explanation about Pool settings ?

Thanks

Shyam

[vTimD]

I just did a quick search and couldn't really find a "Pool Design Guide" so to speak. There is pool info in the View Architecture Planning guide found in the link below. Generally, pools are best split by use-case. If you're in a corporate environment, think of pools split by groups like Finance, HR, Legal, etc.

During an assessment, you'll identify the different use cases. Then you can split the pools by use case. Pools are just logical groupings that share common attributes.

You could also do pools by location, if you wanted to split that way. Dallas, LA, New York. Whatever works best for you for management, that's what you should do.

http://pubs.vmware.com/horizon-62-view/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/view-62-architecture-planning.pdf

[HarelShavit]

Hi tomtom1.

As you said, "it is not exact science".

The most efficient in terms of IT task and worthwhile in terms of ROI use case is to find the most common base line from the target users of the project, and design 1 master image. and after that to create Automatic creation, floating users assignment with linked clone desktop - this design supposed to be the most requested scenario in order to easily justify VDI. (I'm skipping the part of using separate or not, naming convention, Datastore placement etc).

of coarse, each customers have there own needs and the design need to be changed accordingly, and maybe using new technologies like app volume, UEM etc...

Im not sure you will find best practice design guide.. but in my opinion you just need to understand deeply the 3 first pages when creating pool - desktop creation (automated or manual), user assignment (floating and dedicated), and linked lone or full clone..from there, its only according to the specific vSphere environment and customer need (how many servers, which storage, flash not flash, etc)

if you would like to share here the needs ill be happy to brainstorm together with you about the pool design...

good luck

Harel Shavit

EMC