VMware AppVolumes and Storage Groups

CloudVolumes-SquareWhile in the previous posts I have put together around using VMware AppVolumes has been focused around AppStacks, I am switching gears a bit and have been spending time in the lab with the Writable Volumes feature. Writable volumes in a nutshell (and will be covered in another post) allow for a persistent, ie writable, VMDK  to be mounted to a virtual machine when an assigned a user logs in. This VMDK file is based on the AppVolumes Templates and leverages the AppVolumes agent in the guest OS to redirect the following types of information:

  • User Installed Applications only (UIA)
  • User Profile Data only
  • User Installed Applications and User Profile Data

This is all well and good, but compared to AppStacks and their read only workload requirements, Writable volumes brings a different set of challenges. Obviously the first thing to point out is, yes there will be write operations that need to be accounted for on the backend storage and second how many Writable Volumes should be stored/accessed per backend Datastore. In speaking with EUC folks last week at VMware’s Partner Exchange event, the rumor had started that reference architectures are soon to be released and provide direction around configuration minimums and maximums. In the meantime while playing in the lab environment I stumbled across the Storage Groups settings for distributing Writable Volumes across multiple Datastores.

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