VDI and Servers on same hosts

[crgnjul]

We are a small to midsize company.  Currently in production I have 4 host for 100 virtual servers and 3 hosts for VDI (100 concurrent licenses, linked clone desktops).  In DR I have 4 hosts for replicated servers that use almost no resources (EMC Recoverpoint for Virtual Machines) and 10 server VMs that are on all the time (extra DC, Exchange, etc) and 3 hosts for VDI.  It is time to replace the host hardware in DR.  My original thought is to replace them 1 for 1 and continue on as I have been doing.

But now I've started wondering why not combine the 2 environments.  I would not do it in production, but for DR?  Based on quick calculations, I could buy 4 hosts with double the memory (we are not over committed at all, but memory would be an issue LONG before CPU.  CPU on my hosts runs around 8%) instead of the 7 hosts and save some decent money.  I would continue to license servers and view separate so I don't have any licensing issues.  I'd keep View and servers on different datastores on the SAN.

I'd like to hear some input on this thought.  Is there something I'm missing?  Again this is for DR, which of course we hope never even gets used.

[MartinE11]

Hi crgnjul

I actually don't know if it is supported to run both on same vCenter/Cluster/Hosts. Its most probably not considered as best practice, but for a DR it may still work.

Two aspects that just came to my mind:

• vCPU, pCPU: When using fewer hosts you may encounter higher cpu ready values as your physical cpu is shared by more vcpus. This eventually leads to performance issues. (Even though your actual cpu usage is  low)
• HA, DRS Settings: If I got you right, you would go for a single Cluster with 4 ESXi Hosts. Therefore, only Option Regarding HA, DRS Setting is applicable. If you want same behavior for both environments this should not be a problem.
• Licensing: From vSphere perspective licenses for Horizon environments most commonly are CCU based (so you not have to care about how many Hosts you have), whereas your vSphere licenses for Servers are socket-based. Don't know how VMware handles this.

[TomHowarth]

What you are wanting to do is fully supported. and many smaller companies do it for production too.  However you will have to have full ESXi licenses for the DR Hosts, you could NOT utilize the ESXi for Desktop version that comes with Horizon.

[crgnjul]

Thanks.

Licensing is not an issue as I would use the same DR licenses I have now and effectively not use the Horizon server licenses for the connection/security/composer servers just the Horizon Concurrent Desktop licenses for the linked clones.

[mat-so]

Looking for documentation reference to the issues / recommendations for VDI and servers sharing hosts/ vCenter but can't find any. What's the tipping point in size that should drive us to keep them separate? Currently have them separate but are thinking about some major changes to resource allocation and looking for best practise advice.

[sjesse]

There are alot of considerations here, you won't get many documented recommendations here since it's really depends, on how big your environment is. I really suggest if you can keep them separate to continue to do so.