A building block consists of physical servers, a vSphere infrastructure, Horizon 7 servers, shared storage, and virtual machine desktops for end users. A building block is a logical construct and should not be sized for more than 2,000 Horizon desktops. Customers usually include up to five building blocks in a Horizon 7 pod, although in theory you can use more blocks than that, as long as the pod does not go above 10,000 sessions and 7 Horizon Connection Server instances.

Table 1. Example of a LAN-Based Horizon Building Block for 2,000 Virtual Machine Desktops
Item Example
vSphere clusters 1 or more
80-port network switch 1
Shared storage system 1
vCenter Server with View Composer on the same host 1 (can be run in the block itself)
Database MS SQL Server or Oracle database server (can be run in the block itself)
VLANs 3 (a 1Gbit Ethernet network for each: management network, storage network, and VMotion network)

Each vCenter Server can support up to 10,000 virtual machines. This support enables you to have building blocks that contain more than 2,000 virtual machine desktops. However, the actual block size is also subject to other Horizon 7-specific limitations.

If you have only one building block in a pod, use two Connection Server instances for redundancy.