Horizon Pod and Blocks

One key concept in a Horizon environment design is the use of pods and blocks, which gives us a repeatable and scalable approach.

Horizon Pod

A pod is made up of a group of interconnected Connection Servers that broker connections to desktops or published applications.

A pod can broker up to 20,000 sessions (12,000 recommended), including desktop and RDSH sessions.
Multiple pods can be interconnected using the Universal Broker or Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA).
A single Cloud Pod Architecture can scale to a maximum of 250,000 sessions. For numbers above that, separate CPAs can be deployed.

If the virtual desktop infrastructure environment exceeds 20,000 users, pods can be integrated using hardware load balancers and Cloud Pod Architecture. These features route users to the appropriate instance of VMware Horizon by using a single namespace or virtual IP address.

Horizon Desktop Blocks

VMware Horizon block is a component of the VMware Horizon architecture, which is a defined Horizon Connection Server instance. VMware Horizon has two types of building blocks:

Management block: One block only.
Resource block: Up to five building blocks in a VMware Horizon pod. Multiple VMware Horizon resource blocks can be configured based on the number of sessions required.

In large environments, for scalability and operational efficiency, it is normally best practice to have a separate vSphere cluster to host the management components. This keeps the VMs that run services such as Connection Server, Unified Access Gateway, vCenter Server, and databases separate from the desktop and RDSH server VMs.

Pod and Block

The alternative to Horizon Pod Architecture is the Consolidated Pod Architecture, where the Management components are co-hosted on the same vSphere cluster as the end-user resources. This architecture is typical in smaller environments.