In Switzerland sites are often located in the same data center building and two separate rooms represent these sites. To keep management and the architecture simple, some customers or partners would like to take advantage of a vSAN Stretched Cluster.
This question came up several times already at the product management: “Are Instant Clone desktops supported in combination with vSAN Stretched Clusters? And can we use App Volumes?“
The short answer of our product management was that Horizon 7.x (all clones) and a vSAN Stretched Cluster are supported, but that we advise customers to follow the reference architecture design and to test the scalability of the combination of Horizon 7 and a vSAN Stretched Cluster. The caveat is that App Volumes is not supported in this scenario.
A few days ago our VMware Workspace ONE and VMware Horizon 7 Enterprise Edition On-premises Reference Architecture only advised to work with two separate sites, connect them via Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA) and use replication features (e.g. for AppStacks, user profile etc.) to achieve something like an active/active architecture:
But it was not 100% clear if it’s supported to use non-persistent desktops together with a vSAN Stretched Cluster. This gap has been closed with the appendix H:
This new appendix is saying that a stretched active/active architecture is not supported and the use case described in the RA is for full clones only. So, please carefully read our guidelines when working with vSAN Stretched Clusters and Horizon 7.
App Volumes Caveat: There is no support for App Volumes at this time when using a vSAN Stretched Cluster.
Hi Michael,
Does this blog post still valid ? In 2206 App Volumes release notes it’s mentioned that App Volume is now supporting vSAN Stretched Cluster. In which maneer does it support it?
Do you have any update about Horizon instant clone support over vSAN Stretched cluster ? In VMware Techzone, I still only find an Active/Passive scenario. Here we are talking about Horizon management level (Connection Servers, Enrollment servers, …) on the VSI side but what about the VDI infrastructure side ?
Thanks for your answer.
Stéphane
Hi Stéphane,
Yes, vSAN stretched clusters are supported since the App Volumes 2206 release. What would be your scenario? Is it about “storage replication” and a real A/A setup or are you creating a single datastore, a single Horizon Pod and a single App Volumes instance over both data centers? Or is the main reason to have the writable volumes available in both DCs?
To be honest, I probably don’t understand all use cases and trade-offs, but depending on the use cases and setup, designing an A/A setup (especially in DR cases or where writeable volumes are used) could make your life more complicated.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for your answer. The use case is a customer has actually 2 horizon PODs located on 2 different datacenters. On the VSI infrastructure 2 connection servers 2209 on both sites, 2 app volumes 2209 on both sites with NFS replication, DEM 2209 and CPA implemented. Both VDI infrastructure are managed by a dedicated vCenter.
The aim of the customer is to create only one POD, remove a vCenter and use both ESXi infrastructure (DC1 and DC2) with a vSAN stretched cluster. They mainly have Instant Clone VMs and few Full Clone VMs. To my opinion this target architecture is not supported and make no sense only to avoid to manage master images on both sites. The only documentation I found on VMware Techzone is about an Active/Passive architecture with vSAN Stretched cluster for failover purposes. Thanks for your help.
Stéphane