VMware View 5 Design - Use cases, Pools

 

In creating a good VMware View 5 design, the most important part is deciding on use cases and mapping those use cases to pools.

You can think of a use case as a individual master image of an OS.

Mapping a use case to a pool is anything that would force us to put a user in a separate pool.

In my analysis, I am assuming the use of ThinApp as well.

Here are all the factors I could think of that will cause us to create additional pools:

• Type of User
  o    Call center/help desk user
  o    Task user
  o    Power user/Executive
  o    Technical ?
  o    Any other “classes”
• The # of users in a pool – maximum 500 users in a single pool, but you might want to set a lower limit
• Internal and/or External access – these will be different Pools – the reason is that you can only currently use Tags to restrict access and Tags are done at the Pool level
  o    If we need external but not internal, then that is a pool (my guess is that you won’t have/use this one)
  o    If we need internal but not external, then that is a pool
  o    If we need Internal and External, then that is a pool
• Virtual Machine configuration (I recommend limiting this to these 3 or maybe only the 1st two)
  o    A 2 GB, 1 vCPU machine would be a separate pool
  o    A 4 GB, 1 vCPU machine would be a separate pool
  o    A 4 GB, 2 vCPU machine would be a separate pool
• OS, Applications and Drivers
• Operating System
• If you are going to have a Windows 7 and a Windows XP, these will be different pools
• If you are going to have a Windows 7 32bit and a Windows 7 64 bit, these will be different pools   
• Applications (not including ThinApp’ed Apps. Any app that will delivered via ThinApp does not need to be included in the base image).
• Base image with standard apps that are not ThinApp’ed (make a list of applications)
• Above Base image plus specialized apps that are not ThinApp’ed
• Base image plus any special drivers required – You might consider just adding these to the Base image anyway. It will increase the size, but it will reduce the number of Base images that we have to maintain.
• Local Admin access required (static pool). For example, if a user needs to be able to install applications into their desktop
• Users requiring 1-to-1 mapping of specific VM - Static Pool (You should try and use Dynamic pools as much as possible and with the new Persona Management in View 5 it should be possible to do this much more than you could previously).
• Whether Offline desktop mode (Also called Local Mode desktop) allowed

Your next steps would be to analyze each user and decide what the pool for that user will need to look like.

For example, for a standard call center worker: he doesn’t need external access, has access to a standard set of applications (either already included in the base image or ThinApp’ed) and only needs a basic Window 7 64 bit single CPU machine with 2 GB of RAM.

So…that is Pool 1. We can then put all other Call Center workers into that same pool up to 500.

Then we perform the same analysis on the each of the users (or group of users) in your organization. Once we have put each user into a pool, we add up the pools and we then know how many we need of each and what the config for those pools willl look like.

This in turn dictates what the CPU/RAM, Network design and storage requirements will look like.

I will be back to this topic later on.

Jim