Written By: Raj Sharma. Senior Consulting Solutions Architect
raj.sharma@netapp.com
Customer Background
The real customer name has been replaced with "Acme Inc"
"ACME Inc" is the largest healthcare provider in Southern Florida. The health system, which includes 12 hospitals and over 100 outpatient centers, is internationally renowned for its centers of excellence. including cancer, cardiovascular care, orthopedics sports medicine, and neurosciences. ACME Inc is a not-for-profit organization supported by philanthropy and committed to its faith-based charitable mission of medical excellence. Its patient count is soon expected to hit 1.8 million. ACME Inc Its headquartered is in Jacksonville, Florida.
ACME Inc Started a digital transformation three years ago and has worked with Microsoft Azure to infuse cloud technologies across all its patient centers. ACME Inc defined a cloud strategy with the aim of modernizing its services and optimizing IT costs in their path to digitally transform the company.
VMware At ACME Inc
ACME Inc standardized & made a large corporate investment in VMware in the early 2000’s. The company’s direction was to maintain the VMware infrastructure when deployed in the cloud. The Azure VMware Solution (AVS) allowed ACME Inc to migrate and manage workloads in Microsoft Azure by taking advantage of its reach and cloud native capabilities without replacing VMware tools, processes, and skill sets.
ACME Inc were already familiar with VMware horizon as they had it deployed on-premises. VMware Horizon for Azure VMware Solution (AVS) delivers a seamlessly integrated hybrid cloud for virtual desktops and applications. It combines the enterprise capabilities of the VMware Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), delivered as infrastructure as a service (IaaS) on AVS, with the market-leading capabilities of VMware Horizon for a simple, secure, and scalable solution. You can easily address use cases such as on-demand capacity, disaster recovery, and cloud co-location without buying additional data center resources.
Business Requirements
ACME Inc wanted to leverage VMware Application Volumes (App Volumes) with their AVS solution.
App Volumes is the VMware application layering product for virtual machines. App Volumes refers to its application layers as App Stacks. These are virtual disks, either VMDK or VHD, that contain everything needed to run the application, such as executables and Registry keys. The App Volumes agent is responsible for merging the contents of the App Stacks with the file system and Windows Registry. As far as users are concerned, though, the applications contained within an App Stack are installed on the system.
App Stacks can be attached to a computer at startup or to a user session when the user logs in. Per-user application targeting is only supported with the desktop versions of Windows, and it can't be used with server-based computing options such as XenApp. If you do want to use App Volumes with Windows Server, the App Stacks must be assigned to the computers.
ACME Inc's Application Volumes framework was as follows:
• Install Azure VMware Solution and App Volumes in two paired Azure Regions (US East2 & Central US)
• Both sites will be active/active (users can log into either region)
• Each AVS SDDC will host a maximum of 2000 Desktops. Then a new AVS SDDC will be created
• App volumes will be associated with each user Login (ie associated with each users AD identity)
Business Challenges
Based on Desktop capacity (2000 desktops per SDDC), ACME Inc has deployed five AVS Private Clouds in each region.
ACME Inc’s Challenges with the traditional deployment of Application Volumes using native VMware storage (VSAN) include:
1. App volumes storage will be based on dedicated silos of storage. Meaning VSAN capacity dedicated for App volumes will provide the app stacks for only the AVS SDDC Private the VSAN is installed in. (No shared component across AVS Private Clouds).
2. Managing OS updates and patching. Any time a Operating System or an application needs patching, each individual
silo would need to be updated. Multiple patching windows and UAT testing for each farm would be required.
3. Application security risk. When high-severity vulnerabilities are found that require immediate action to patch or
update, systems may go unpatched due to the complexity of updating all the required silos of individual application
volumes.
4. A seamless replication of the read only application volumes from one region to another.
Solution
Based on the business requirements listed above, the Microsoft account team that was engaged with the ACME Inc AVS deployment reached out to the Azure NetApp Files team aligned to the account, who in turn engaged the ANF/AVS Tiger team. In a collaborative effort. Microsoft focused on the Global reach networking of the AVS solution and the ANF team worked directly with the client to POC Azure NetApp Files Datastores as the central NFS shared storage to host the Application volumes across all SDDC’s in each region.
Azure NetApp file Datastores for AVS was configured and deployed in 2 hours. The customer migrated the Application volumes to the ANF NFS Datastore and shared it across two SDDC’s in each region. The Application volumes would utilize ANF Cross Region Replication (a native ANF feature) to propagate any changes from the primary site to the secondary site via storage block-based replication.
High-level scheme of the ACME POC solution on Azure:
After 4 business days, the customer was so impressed with the Azure NetApp Files Datastore solution that App volumes was provisioned to every SDDC in the environment and became the production solution for Application Volumes for AVS.
The key differentiating and value-added elements of the solution on Azure proposed to ACME Inc were:
• Azure NetApp Files Datastores allowing the same datastore to be shared across multiple VMware clusters, as well as
multiple VMware Private clouds.
• Azure NetApp Files (ANF) providing high-performance, low-latency, scalable storage that can replicate between azure
regions with no additional AVS costs.
• The massive on-demand scalability of the Azure platform, to deal with constantly changing workload demands.
Written by Raj Sharma
Please see "Configure Azure NetApp Files with Azure VMware Solution running VMware Horizon - (Part 2)" to learn how to configure ANF & AVS for VMware Application Volumes