As detailed in this chapter, there are many design considerations such as DHCP lease time, the minimum number of vCenters, and the number of cores to buy in a server platform. For large environments of thousands of vDesktops, it may be easiest to start with the vSphere maximums and work down. For small environments or Proof of Concepts (PoCs) that don't require a massive virtual infrastructure, the concepts covered in this chapter are still relevant as a successful PoC can grow rapidly in adoption. Finally, the concept of a pod architecture, or a collection of vCenter Servers, is typically new to those familiar only with designing virtual server solutions on the VMware vSphere platform. They can take some time to understand the new concepts and working up against the vSphere and vCenter maximums.

The next chapter shows how it's important to understand all of the possible failure points within the VDI solution and how redundancy can be built in to mitigate those failures. Failing to...