Your first consideration will be how much storage space you need for your Horizon View environment. You will need to consider where the relative elements of your virtual infrastructure are to be located. The first and easy bit is going to be totalling the required space for any server components. Often, the server components will live on the same storage device as the rest of your virtual infrastructure, and the desktops will live on a dedicated storage device. However, this is not compulsory and will depend on the type of storage you are utilizing and the levels of separation you desire. You will then need to understand the required storage for your desktops based upon the technologies being used to deploy the desktops, such as Linked Clones, Full Clones, or Instant Clones, not forgetting to include persistent disks for user data if you plan on using them.

An important point to remember is to think beyond just the virtual desktops. If you are planning on delivering apps with App Volumes, then you will also need space to store App Stacks.

With Linked Clones, you need to understand the growth of the Linked Clone between the refresh and recompose operations. The following diagram gives an example of some areas for consideration regarding storage for a typical desktop pool that's utilizing Linked Clones and persistent disks:

The replica from which a Linked Clone originates needs to be located on fast storage, either local to the host server or via a SAN. To enable this in Horizon View, you can choose the location of where the replica should live, and one of the recommendations is that the replica sits on fast storage, such as local SSD, for example.

The recommendation is that during your POC and pilot stages, you collect this type of storage usage information. Once you have this information, you will be able to use a spreadsheet to create a model to predict storage utilization, and then you can grow your environment. The following table depicts a sample Excel spreadsheet outlining the storage requirement across three desktop pools:

During the POC, we have been able to understand the capacity that's required per desktop for the Linked Clones. This is a key component for understanding the overall capacity required for the solution moving forward.

This now leads to the other part of the storage story, that is, storage performance.