This topic provides an overview of the platform infrastructure.

Overview

The service grid forms the basic infrastructure, enabling the administrator to add compute resources (servers) and storage to the platform and assign these compute resources and storage to tenants. The service grid contains both appliances and hosts.

  • A 'tenant' is a customer that consumes hosted virtual desktops from a service provider.
  • An 'appliance' is a virtual machine (VM) combined with a functional unit of the product software in the platform.

Data Centers

A data center is purely a container: it does not represent any piece of hardware or software, but it usually corresponds to a geographic data center managed by a service provider.

The data center logically groups the service provider's lower-level virtualization resources. A data center has one or more resource managers associated with it, and each resource manager has desktop managers and hosts associated with it. The number of physical servers in the data center mainly depends on the size of the tenant installation and the number of tenants.

Adding a new data center is accomplished during the appliance bootstrap process; refer to the installation instructions for more details.

Management Appliances

Three management appliances control the platform:

  • Service Provider Appliance

    Provides two types of access to the system: through the Service Center web-based UI; as a transit point for enabling ssh access to all the management appliances in the data center. The service provider appliance is the first appliance installed in a data center and provides the foundation to install the remainder of the application.

  • Resource Manager Appliance

    The resource manager abstracts the specifics about the desktop infrastructure from the tenant appliances and allows multiple desktop managers to communicate with their respective virtualization resources. A resource manager appliance integrates with the hypervisor and storage infrastructure in a given data center. A single resource manager appliance can be shared across multiple tenants.

  • Tenant Appliance

    Provides the tenant with both end user and administrative access to their virtual desktops. End users access and manage their individual virtual desktops using the Horizon Client. Administrators create and manage their virtual desktops using the Administration Console. The tenant appliance includes the desktop manager, a per-tenant resource that manages each tenant's virtualization resources and communicates with a tenant's hosts (hypervisors). You associate the desktop manager with a resource manager and one or more host managers.

Hosts

  • Management Host

    A physical machine that runs a hypervisor and hosts multiple management appliances.

  • Virtual Desktop Host

    A physical machine that runs a hypervisor and hosts virtual desktops. A virtual desktop is a virtual machine that is running remotely (relative to the end user).

Networks

There are three distinct networks within the data center:

  • The backbone network is fully controlled by the service provider. This network is a link local non-routable subnet (169.254.0.0/16) that is logically separated from all tenant networks. The backbone network connects all management appliances. Tenant appliances connect to the service provider resource manager through the backbone network.
  • The service provider network is a discrete network. The service provider VLAN is used to communicate with the service provider appliance. This network connects virtual desktop hosts to VM storage systems.
  • The tenant network is fully controlled by the tenant, again as a discrete VLAN that is separate from the service provider and other tenant networks. The tenant network connects the tenant appliances to a tenant's virtual desktops. The tenant VLAN is not accessible to the service provider. (A tenant network is not a subnet of the service provider network. Rather, it is a logical extension of the tenant network existing in the service provider data center.)