By Dale Carter, Consulting Architect, End User Computing
Over the past several months I have been heavily involved in testing and deploying VMware Horizon Workspace into a very large production environment.
During the deployment and testing of the product I came across a few things that might be helpful for everyone to know as they start to deploy Horizon Workspace in a production environment.
Deployment
DNS Servers – During the deployment on Horizon you can only have 1 DNS server configured with in your IP pool, if you have more than 1 Horizon will not run through the configuration wizard. Having just 1 DNS server can be a single point of failure and if that DNS server was to go down then Horizon Workspace will have issues.
A work around for this is once you have deployed your Horizon Workspace vApp power down the vApp. Edit the IP Pool and add a second DNS server and then power the vApp back on. You will then notice that Horizon see’s both DNS Servers.
Proxy Servers – Horizon Workspace Manager virtual machines access the global catalog and other Web services on the Internet. If your network configuration provides Internet access through an HTTP proxy, you must adjust your proxy settings on the Manager (service-va) virtual machine.
1. Log in as root to the Manager (service-va) virtual machine.
2. Run the YaST utility from the service-va command line.
3. Select the Network Services tab on the left, and then select the Proxy page on the right.
4. Enter the correct proxy Name or IP address in the HTTP field.
5. Under No Proxy Domains, you must include the local domain that the Horizon VM’s are a member of.
6. Select “Finish”
7. Select “Quit”
8. Type “Reboot” to reboot the service-va virtual machine
9. Exit the console
vCenter Account
Another note about using a proxy server – If a proxy server is required in your environment, then in order to do an upgrade from one version to the next the proxy server will need to be configured on each of the VM’s with in the vApp. You can follow the above procedures on each of the VM’s to update the proxy servers before you start your upgrade. After the upgrade you can then turn the proxy server off on all of your VM’s except the service-vm.
vCenter Account – During install the account that is used to connect to vCenter must be a full administrator of vCenter, this is so the account can create the relevant extent within vCenter. Once Horizon is deployed, this account can be scaled back to just have administrator rights to the Horizon vApp itself.
During my next blog post, I will highlight a couple of trick that can help with the performance of the Horizon Workspace database when it is handling a large number of users.
Dale is a Senior Solutions Architect and member of the CTO Ambassadors. Dale focuses in the End User Compute space, where Dale has become a subject matter expert in a number of the VMware products. Dale has more than 20 years experience working in IT having started his career in Northern England before moving the Spain and finally the USA. Dale currently hold a number of certifications including VCP-DV, VCP-DT, VCAP-DTD and VCAP-DTA.
For updates you can follow Dale on twitter @vDelboy
