You can use VSAN with Horizon View Advanced or Enterprise license and given the improvements to VSAN over the last year its becoming more and more appealing. The following will illustrate how easy it is to configure linked clone desktops on VSAN as well as showing the default storage policies assigned to the desktops. First enable VSAN - see my previous posts here. Note - VSAN 6.2 is available now but the below is on VSAN 6.1.
Login to your connection server and create a new pool. Choose Automatic and Floating
Select the relevant vCenter and Composer server and add a pool ID
Enter the pool details. Select the naming convention and how many desktops
Choose to enable a persistent disk or not, I will select one here to show the Storage Policy’s created. Under Storage Policy Management choose to Use VMware Virtual SAN
Choose the parent VM and snapshot the linked clones will be created from. Select the cluster and hosts enabled for VSAN and choose the VSAN datastore.
Choose the required Advanced Storage Options and Guest Customization settings
The pool will now be created. Horizon View automatically creates the storage polices and assigns them to your desktops. To view these and to see the default settings open the Web Client - Home - VM Storage Policies. Note the description View Auto Created
First take a look as the replica assigned Storage Policy. Go to Monitor - VMs and Virtual Disks you can see the policy is attached to the replica created during the pool creation. Right click the policy and Edit Settings. Notice the default rule set created - this VM is protected with 1 fault tolerance and 10% read cache reservation.
Now take a look as the policy created for the OS disk of the linked clone desktops. Notice the new desktops will appear here and the created hard disks. Check the settings here and see they are different to the replica, by default the desktops are set to 0 fault tolerance and 0 read cache reservation.
Finally take a look at the persistent disk policy, notice it is set to 1 fault tolerance and 100% object space reservation.
These are only the default settings and can be changed