Eric Sloof

This paper describes how to address business requirements and use cases with services constructed by integrating the components of VMware Horizon® 7 Enterprise Edition. It is intended to help customers—IT architects, consultants, and administrators involved in the early phases of planning, design, and deployment by offering a standard, repeatable, and highly scalable approach to design and integration that can easily be adapted to specific environments and requirements. 

The approach taken in this paper is, as with any technology solution, to start by defining business requirements and drivers. These requirements can, in turn, be mapped to use cases that can be adapted to most scenarios. With Horizon 7 Enterprise Edition we can deliver solutions for these use cases by creating services composed of several components in a very efficient and reusable manner.


The resultant environment and the services delivered can easily be adapted to address changes in the business and use cases. One key step in addressing the use cases is the definition of blueprints for the services to be delivered. This allows us to understand the components and parts that need to be designed, built, and integrated.

DRS Doctor is a command line tool that can be used to diagnose DRS behavior in VMware vCenter clusters. When run against a DRS enabled cluster, it records information regarding the state of the cluster, the work load distribution, DRS moves, etc., in an easy to read log format.

The goal of DRS Doctor is to give VI admins better insight into DRS and the actions it performs. It is very useful for analyzing DRS actions and troubleshooting issues with very little overhead. This is also an easy way for support engineers to read into customer environments without having to rely on developers to debug DrmDump logs in order to troubleshoot simple DRS issues.

DRS Doctor connects to the vCenter server and tracks the list of cluster related tasks and actions. It also tracks DRS recommendations generated and reasons for each recommendation, which is currently only available in a hard-to-read format in DrmDump files. At the end of each log, it dumps the Host and VM resource consumption data to give a quick overview of cluster state. It also provides an operational audit at the end of each log file.

The NSX Troubleshooting Guide describes how to monitor and troubleshoot the VMware NSX system by using the NSX Manager user interface, the vSphere Web Client, and other NSX components, as needed. 


This manual is intended for anyone who wants to install or use NSX in a VMware vCenter environment. The information in this manual is written for experienced system administrators who are familiar with virtual machine technology and virtual datacenter operations.

This manual assumes familiarity with VMware Infrastructure 5.x, including VMware ESX, vCenter Server, and the vSphere Web Client

The integration of VMware NSX and the F5 BIG-IP platform, with its full-proxy architecture, provides automated provisioning and deployment of the rich set of F5 application delivery services to both network and virtualization operators and delivers a reliable, enterprise-class application experience to SDDC environments.

NSX, VMware's network virtualization and security platform, delivers logical network and security services and an operational model for the network similar to that delivered by VMware for computing virtualization.

This means data center operators can create virtual networks on demand without having to reconfigure the physical network, enabling them to provision network and security services—including L4–7 application services—in minutes, increase network operations efficiency, and optimally use resources. NSX-distributed service framework enables automated provisioning of services on every hypervisor across the data center, and its scale-out architecture allows services to be scaled on demand by simply adding new hosts.

Together, F5 and VMware have reduced repetitive and time-consuming processes by allowing IT staff to pre-define application delivery policies.

Download: F5 Reference Architecture for VMware NSX

This document details the design and deployment details of VMware NSX in a Horizon End-User Computing environment and is targeted towards virtualization, networking and security architects interested in deploying Horizon for virtual desktops and NSX in a vSphere environment.


This document highlights design and deployment considerations for utilizing NSX to implement network virtualization, create a secure end-user environment, and load-balance for Horizon infrastrucutre.