How to reduce the overhead of managing multiple Desktop Pools under Horizon?
This is the question that everyone asks when they have multiple Desktop Pools serving multiple customers and one Golden Image for each of them.
Answer to this question is very simple, multiple snapshots on the same Golden Image.
Until now, we were trying to manage one Golden Image for each Customer/Desktop Pool and that was taking a toll when there was time to patch the OS.
If you only have 2 or 3 customers this is not an issue, but imagine you have 50 customers with Development and Production VDIs, it’s a nightmare.
How to accomplish this, would be your next question. Again the answer is very simple.
On my example we have multiple customers sharing the same base OS and Software, changing only the networks
Do all the configurations on the OS (patching, software installation, upgrade…) and don’t forget to prep the GI for VDIs. Configure the network adapters and take a snapshot.
This will be your first snapshot. After this revert back, change the network adapters and do another snapshot. Make sure you use a naming convention for the snapshots as it will be easier for you when configuring the Desktop Pools.
Repeat the process for as many times as you need.
Keep in mind that VMware recommends not to take more than 32 chain snapshots of one VM.
Now, all you need to do is head over to Horizon administration page and configure the Desktop Pools with the corresponding snapshot.
As always,
Have fun and keep it simple
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While I get what you are saying and having only one gold image, but you still have to revert back and forth to patch or update the individual snapshots for your pools, patching the original snapshot does not roll forward down to all the snapshots. With VMware recommending no more than 32 snapshot, which you really want as few as possible and cleanup as you go, your statement of 50 customers does not fit this example.
VMware recommends not have 32 snapshots in a chain. As the only thing that changes are the portgroups for each customer, what we do is patch the GI, delete all the snapshots and create one snapshot for each customer from the root of the GI, so to summarize we patch the GI, create a snapshot for customer A with the correct portgroups, revert back to the root change the portgroups and create a new snapshot for customer B and so on….
To make only change in VLAN, you can run powershell command for each pool for one time. You can define single or multiple VLANs for single pool.