Shared Storage Considerations

Storage design considerations are one of the most important elements of a successful VMware Horizon architecture.

vSphere lets you virtualize disk volumes and file systems so that you can manage and configure storage without having to consider where the data is physically stored.

Fibre Channel SAN arrays, iSCSI SAN arrays, and NAS arrays are widely used storage technologies supported by vSphere to meet different data center storage needs. The storage arrays are connected to and shared between groups of servers through storage area networks. This arrangement allows aggregation of the storage resources and provides more flexibility in provisioning them to virtual machines.

You can use VMware vSAN, which virtualizes the local physical solid-state disks and hard disk drives available on ESXi hosts into a single datastore shared by all hosts in a cluster. vSAN provides high-performance storage with policy-based management, so that you specify only one datastore when creating a desktop pool, and the various components, such as virtual machine files, replicas, user data, and operating system files, are placed on the appropriate solid-state drive (SSD) disks or direct-attached hard disks (HDDs). For more information about vSAN, see the vSphere documentation at https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/index.html. For information on best practices, see the technical white paper VMware Horizon on VMware vSAN Best Practices.

For more details on storage configuration for Horizon 8, see "Managing Storage for Virtual Desktops" in the Windows Desktops and Applications in Horizon document.