Horizon CPA - Users' profiles availability

[Alex Karibov]

We have two sites (Site1 and Site2) and CPA enabled between them. Currently, Site1 is the active one and Site2 is leveraged only when Site1 is unavailable. There is a DFS file share where FSLogix users' profiles are stored. The active node of that DFS share is in Site1 and the passive one is in Site2 with storage replica between them. So, users' profiles are stored locally to VMs (both in Site1). If it is a disaster, everything will go to Site2.

Now I have an idea to spread our users between sites (to make active-active pods). Everything looks clear except for making FSLogix users' profiles always available on local shares in both sites. The idea is that a user has global assignment to a pool from each site and can be directed by a GSLB (on different days) to Site1 or Site2. The GSLB doesn't know about a geographical location of a user and sites are located near to each other, so it just does round-robin. For example, today a user session might be in Site1, tomorrow it will be in Site2.

The Omnissa CPA architecture guide suggests having two different active SMB shares in different sites. But VMs in different sites is looking for users' profiles only in active shares. So, how to replicate profiles between Profile Share 1 and Profile Share 2?

I consider using the following technologies:

• FSLogix Cloud Cache with SMB shares on vSAN FC or Windows File Servers.
  But it still has some drawbacks. There're hypothetical data loss in situations when local cache can't be written to cloud providers and increased time of users' logons and logouts or inability to work with smb shares on vSAN FS (https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/326647/share-is-not-replicating-when-using-micr.html) which are important for me.
• Currently used in the company DFS SMB share with storage replica.
  But then half of the VMs will get users' profiles from other site.
• Scale-Out File Server.
  But I've found some information that it's not recommended to use in a multi-site infrastructure.

So, the question is... What is the best way to store FSLogix vhdx containers in CPA environment with two replicated active SMB shares?

[Sean Massey-1]

So there are a couple of things here.

First...FSLogix is a Microsoft product.  Any architecture guidance on designing highly available profile shares for FSLogix would ultimately need to follow what Microsoft supports and recommends.  It also depends on what technology you're using for your SMB shares - guidance for Windows File Servers will be different from guidance for a NAS or even different vendors of NAS appliances because NetApp is different from Pure and Isilon for example.

Second, the guidance you're seeing about having a share active in one site and passive in another is based on what Microsoft supports.  Microsoft does not support Active-Active file shares for user profile data.  As I understand it, DFS-R does not replicate file locks, so a user with an active desktop session in both sites, or a user who logs out of a session in Site A and gets a Session in Site B before their profile data gets replicated, can ultimately lose data or create issues with their own settings.

There really isn't a good "this is supported 100% by everyone" architecture for this problem.

In a multi-site scenario like you're talking about, you'd be using a combination of array-based (if using an appliance/NAS) or DFS-R (if using Windows File Servers) for replication and DFS-N to provide a global namespace for accessing the shares.  You would set up DFS-N so that all of your shares would be accessed through that global namespace, and DFS-N would refer users to the hosting file server (or the nearest hosting file server based on the rules you define if multiple servers are hosting the share).  (This is also nice because you can move a file share to a new server and not change anything about how the users access it...so no shortcuts get broken, etc).

Finally, you might want to consider configuring Home Sites in your CPA environment and assigning users to specific sites.  This will ensure that the users are always going to the site where their file share is active. Horizon 24.06 also has a new CPA home site redirection feature that will redirect users to the site where their desktop is running. https://docs.omnissa.com/bundle/Horizon-Cloud-Pod-Architecture/page/HomeSiteRedirection.html

 

[Graeme Gordon]

In the Reference Architecture I portray two sites that are both potentially actively being used. This is to show the more complex possible scenario.

In my diagram, Profile Share 1 and Profile Share 2 are separate shares for separate groups of users, and you would not want to replicate data between them.

• Profile Share 1 is the live share for users that by default are serviced from Site 1. It is replicated to a standby share in Site 2 for DR purposes.
• Profile Share 2 is the live share for users that by default are serviced from Site 2. It is replicated to a standby share in Site 1 for DR purposes.

If you intend to have only have one site actively service users, then you can do this with one live share in site 1 that is replicated to a standby share in site 2.

https://techzone.omnissa.com/resource/dynamic-environment-manager-architecture#profile-archive-shares