Pooling Question

[raudi1]

Hi VMware community

I am an engineer for a Software company, and one of our customers is building up some VMs using your VMware Horizon 8.0 product. The customer intends to create a pool of workstations to be able to run our software, but there are some possible compatibility issues. Our software client requires a critical (and proprietary) process to be able to run, and the key here is that only one instance of that process can be present on the Operating System if our software is to work correctly.

I have three questions:

1. In creating a pool of workstations, does that pool run on a single Operating System?

2. My customer said that the workstations are pulled off of the Horizon Datastore. What is the Horizon Datastore?

3. Is the Horizon Datastore comprised of a single Operating System?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Mickeybyte]

@raudi1 

In Horizon you can choose to have single-session VDI (e.g. Win10 OS) or multi-session VDI (RDSH). Assuming they are using single-session VDI, they create a base image including the necessary software and that image is cloned to a VDI for each user. So there should be no problems with your software.

The Horizon Datastore is probably the vSphere datastore where the VDIs are stored. There's no such thing as a Horizon Datastore.

[raudi1]

@Mickeybyte Thanks so much for your quick, clear, and concise reply! I have one more question for you. I was reading up on RDSH technology in this article (see bottom), and from what that article says, I get an impression that while the Multi-session VDI's don't require the deployment of a full operating system for each user, it is a possible option that can be configured. Is this the case? Is it possible with Multi-session VDI's to enforce that a full operating system might be deployed for each user?

Thanks again!

https://www.eginnovations.com/rdsh-server-desktop-monitoring#:~:text=RDSH%20stands%20for%20Remote%20....

[Mickeybyte]

@raudi1 

In Horizon, you either choose RDSH or single-user VDI. 

RDSH is always based on a server operating system with MS Remote Desktop Services role installed (Terminal server)

Single user VDI is mostly based on Windows 10/11 but you can also use server-based OS (2016/2019/2022) without Remote desktop services role installed. Then it will be used as a single user VDI instead of RDSH.

Not sure what you mean by "a full operating system might be deployed for each user". You always need a full operating system. 

There's a difference however between "published applications" and "full desktop" for the user. In RDSH environments, you can choose to only publish applications so the user doesn't get the full RDSH desktop, but only the application the user needs, or published desktop which gives the user a full desktop on the RDSH farm (including start menu, taskbar, ...). In the single-user VDI situation, the user mostly gets a full desktop VDI, although it is now also possible to publish applications from a single-user VDI in Horizon (in that case, each user will still have its own dedicated VDI, but only see the published applications, not the full desktop)

Hope that makes it a bit more clear.

[raudi1]

Hi Mickey

Thanks for the clarification! I think I understand now.