Load Balancing Considerations for Private Clouds

Grazed from 2X. Author: Charlie Williams.

Private clouds can be used for a number of different purposes, but one of the most popular uses involves providing users with virtual desktops. Building a private Desktop as a Service (DaaS) architecture involves more than just hosting desktop operating systems on a hypervisor. There must be a system in place to connect end users to the virtual desktops.

Matching end user requests to virtual desktops is usually the job of a connection broker. In most DaaS environments, the connection broker receives the end user’s request for a virtual desktop session and then connects the user to one of the available virtual desktops within a virtual desktop pool. Although this brokering of connections is of undeniable importance, there are other tasks that the connection broker must also perform if the DaaS infrastructure is to operate efficiently. One of the most important of these tasks in load balancing…

Some load balancing solutions attempt to evenly distribute virtual desktop usage across the available host servers in an effort to ensure that each host is handling an even workload. Although this approach sounds good in theory, it does have a major flaw. Evenly distributing user sessions across virtual desktop hosts only ensures that each hypervisor is hosting an identical number of virtual desktops. It does nothing to ensure that the host servers have equal workloads. This is because resource consumption is directly tied to the ways in which end users interact with their virtual desktops. One user might exert a very light workload, while another exerts a much heavier workload…

Read more from the source @ http://www.2x.com/blog/2013/05/virtualization/load-balancing-considerations-for-private-clouds/