Persistent desktops with CPA - Active-Passive DR on Horizon 8

[M Aziz]

Hi Team, 

We are planning to design CPA active-passive DR architecture but we have some persistent desktops, all of the documentations we went through are talking about the non-persistent desktops where the desktops can be reprovisioned on the dr site in the case of failure and then comes the role of presenting the user data + applications are added on top of the desktops wthrough app vols and DEMs on the DR site. 

 

Any ideas? where the infrstcrucre in main and DR site are vsan based where array based replication is not an option, and there is no vsan stretched cluster to users have their persistent disks are available across the 2 sites.

 

Bets regards, 

M 

[Graeme Gordon]

When you are using persistent desktops it does become difficult as you can potentially have user data inside the virtual disks that make up those VMs. Even where array replication is available this still presents challenges as you need to determine how often you can replicate/ update the DR copy and how you switch users over to use the DR copy.

With persistent desktops sometimes the approach taken is to try and extract as much user data as possible, just as you would with non-persistent desktops (using DEM, etc). That makes it easier to protect and replicate at least some of the user data. You might also consider providing these users with a temporary desktop in the DR site (e.g. a user who normally has a non-persistent desktop gets an instant clone in a DR event that might have core functionally (but maybe not all their custom setup, apps, etc.)

I touch on this topic in the following guide: https://techzone.omnissa.com/resource/providing-disaster-recovery-horizon#segmenting-use-cases

[Sean Massey-1]

I agree with @Graeme Gordon.  Persistent desktop DR is really hard. 

The big questions with any Horizon DR plan is around the DR plan you'll be designing against and any business or technical requirements that are in place that you will need to meet.  What is your "Recovery Time Objective" (RTO - how long it takes to get the environment back in service) and "Recovery Point Objective" (RPO - how much data loss can you tolerate).

With Horizon, another factor is business requirements around use case and user expectations.  Who are the users?  What applications are they using? What are they doing on their desktops? What expectations do the business and the users have and/or what has been communicated to them? These are all questions that come into play when designing for Horizon DR, whether it is persistent or non-persistent.

If you can provide a few more details, I can help talk you through some options and considerations.