This book will focus on developing a highly available solution for the VDI environment. While providing a solution for the entire virtual infrastructure is outside the scope of this book, Horizon View uses vSphere components, and understanding and utilizing the following VMware vSphere features are important to implement a robust VDI.
VMware High Availability (HA) can be used to monitor and protect against physical host failures and can also be used to monitor and protect vDesktops themselves. VMware HA works by monitoring physical hosts in a given cluster. If a host is unable to communicate to the specific default gateway on a service console interface for 15 continuous seconds, an HA failover event is triggered. vSphere 5 also introduced datastore heartbeating, which is used when a network heartbeat failure has occurred. Datastore heartbeats provide an additional level of host isolation verification.