By Narasimha Krishnakumar, Product Management, End-User Computing, VMware

On behalf of everyone in the End-User-Computing (EUC) team at VMware, I’m proud to bring to you an exciting product announcement from EUC, just in time for the other Virtual-SAN-related announcements from VMware!

Today, VMware announced the General Availability (GA) of VMware Virtual SAN 5.5 and I’d like to take a moment to also introduce Horizon View 5.3.1. With this release, we are continuing the tradition of rapidly introducing innovations to market. And, now, the details:

• Horizon View 5.3.1 supports VMware Virtual SAN 5.5. VMware Virtual SAN 5.5 is a component of VMware vSphere 5.5U1.
• Horizon View 5.3.1 when used with VMware Virtual SAN 5.5 has been shown to reduce the total CAPEX cost of storage by up to 50%.
• Horizon View 5.3.1 GA is intended for use with Virtual SAN 5.5 datastores only. There are no other new features in Horizon View 5.3.1 besides support for Virtual SAN 5.5.
• Customers can purchase a Virtual SAN 5.5 license to deploy Horizon View 5.3.1.

Using Horizon View 5.3.1 with Virtual SAN 5.5

Using Horizon View 5.3.1 with Virtual SAN 5.5 is a simple three-step process:

1. Set up a cluster of vSphere 5.5U1 nodes (minimum 3) with at-least one SSD and one hard disk in each of the nodes. It is best to use the same number of drives on each ESXi node and keep the environment homogeneous.

2. Enable Virtual SAN using the vSphere Web Client interface as shown in Figure 2. Select Turn ON Virtual SAN.

Figure 2: vSphere Web Client Interface Showing Cluster Settings

3. Create a Horizon View desktop pool using the standard workflow. When presented with the option to select a datastore for virtual machines, select the datastore with type vsan as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Selecting a Virtual SAN Datastore

After these steps are performed, Horizon View 5.3.1 will start using the vsanDatastore to store the VMDKs of the virtual desktops, delivering an ultra-low desktop TCO and great end-user experience.

For more details on deploying and using Virtual SAN 5.5 with Horizon View 5.3.1, refer to the Knowledge Base article Horizon View 5.3.1 on VMware Virtual SAN – Quick Start Guide.

For the latest performance results on Horizon View 5.3.1 with VMware Virtual SAN, see VDI Performance Benchmarking on VMware Virtual SAN 5.5.