Today, as I was talking to one of my colleagues, I started to think about the possibility of delivering a multi-site stateless VDI solution that maintained a personal user experience. In this design, we are going to assume a Site A and Site B location, they both have stateless pools fronted by a global load balancer.
Typically, setting up this design works well if you don't need to deliver a feature-rich personalized desktop experience, it would be better for locked down kiosk style machines. But, if we employ Liquidware Labs ProfileUnity, we can replicate the datastore hosting the profile, user-authored data, and FlexApps to Site B.
Then you are going to say, "Mr. Gaudreau, when the user logs onto their virtual desktop pool in Site B they are going to pull their profile information across the WAN from the Site A datastore!" Which, normally, is correct; but we are going build in two different ProfileUnity configuration files into our respective desktop pools and point our GPO to execute them locally (check out my previous post).
First, open up the Guided Configuration file found on C:\ProfileUnity on the Parent Image in the Site A pool.
Below is a picture of my Guided Configuration policy file on the Parent Image, this was created by the guided configuration wizard from the ProfileUnity 5.5 Configuration Management web portal. You will notice the mapping to the SITEA server.
Next, open up the Guided Configuration file on the Site B pool and Replace All the SITEA references with SITEB.
So what have we done? It is very straight forward; we have designed two stateless pools, the corporate users can be load balanced between Site A and Site B, profile management is delivered from the local datastore, and if there is enough available capacity you can provide business continuity to your VDI environment.
This design will permit a user that is directed to the Site B pool to obtain their profile information from the Site B ProfileUnity file repository.
Key Benefits
- Stateless architecture for improved security and reliability
- Requires less operational support
- Lower storage requirements
- Enhanced business continuity
- Personalized user experience
