VDI - Horizon View 5.3 & Load Balancing

Knubje

Knubje

Knubje

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Joined
5 Jun 2008
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Portsmouth/Fareham
Hi all,

I am interested to see if there is anyone here with experience of VMware Horizon View 5.3 VDI solutions using a hardware load balancer?

My current situation is that I am trying to get a proof of concept system working. I have a security, connection and composer server with images deployed and it all works when I go directly to the Security server address.

The next step is to deploy a hardware load balancer in front of it (BIG IP F5). I've got it all working, with the exception of the Blast Secure Gateway for HTML5 access to the desktop via a browser using port 8443. This is partly due to there being no real documentation, that I can find, on how to do this from either VMware or F5.

I'd love to bend anyone's ear who has any experience (or success) in any of the above technology in an attempt to help me out!

Cheers!
 
My apologies, I've used View a lot in the past but my knowledge isn't amazing. In terms of load balancing, in the past we have simply used the rebalance command on a pool to allow the composer to spread the VMs load evenly across multiple hosts.

I'm probably oversimplifying things but hopefully someone more experienced can offer more advice!
 
We've never found the need to load balancers for vdi, but if guess it depends on the amount of user sessions you have connecting to the brokers.

We're just about to put Citrix netscalers in front of our exchange environment, it might be worth you checking them out?
 
Hi,

We are potentially looking at scaling out to 5000 workstations, so we will be using one of our hardware NLBs. We do this for most of our core services where possible.

We also already have our Exchange platform in front of the F5's already, which was pretty straight forward also. I do not think we will be looking at Citrix as they have been investigated for this pre-pilot VDI implementation for XenServer/XenDesktop and the solution wasn't as sleek as VMware.
 
We currently use our enterprise LB - Cisco ACE to load balance our view VDI environments. Works fine as long as you use latest Cisco firmware release and as ever the SSL certificate configuration can be tricky.

If you don't have load balancers at present give SERIOUS consideration to using the F5 BIGIP product as you can buy modules that tallk to Active Directory, meaning you can direct users to specific VDI areas such as failover datacentres depending on their AD pool entitlement etc. This is REALLY useful and if we were going from scratch this is the way I'd go for load balancing
 
Hi,

Yes, we are using one of our BIG F5 LTM devices to do this, as I mentioned earlier.

I'm looking for people who have experience using VMware Horizon View ideally 5.3 (but recent-ish versions should be fine) and BIG IP F5 LB's.

Specifically, someone who has managed to successfully configure the Blast Secure Gateway for HTML 5 on them. It's not covered in any F5 documentation or their iApp. Neither is it mentioned in any Horizon View documentation I can find.

Cheers,
Knub
 
After several days of battling I got everything working today.

If anyone ever has any issues with Horizon View VDI and/or F5 NLB's feel free to give me a shout as it's been a pain in the backside!

Awesome to have it all working though! Now...to scale up!
 
What was the basic principle of LB config? We don't have F5, but the basic setup shouldn't be too different.

I was thinking it'd be nice to install it as an evaluation feature for the idiots senior management to play with and a couple of the guys were asking about it today
 
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