A common question for multi-site VMware Dynamic Environment Manager deployments is whether users from multiple sites can access a single SMB file share instance at the primary data center. While this is possible, there are design considerations to ensure the best experience.

DirectFlex is a feature of VMware Dynamic Environment Manager that reads and writes personalization data as applications are opened and closed. DirectFlex improves the efficiency of the VMware Dynamic Environment Manager agent by only fetching configuration data that is needed, when it is needed, rather than reading it all during login. By design, DirectFlex makes frequent requests to the SMB file servers hosting the VMware Dynamic Environment Manager configuration and user shares. The latency of these requests directly affects the end-user experience. Typically, anything less than 20 milliseconds has no noticeable impact. As latency gets worse, the chance and severity of impact to the end-user experience increases.

Even a high-performing ExpressRoute may have latency greater than 20 milliseconds, so it is recommended to deploy VMware Dynamic Environment Manager in the same Azure region as your Horizon Cloud Service pod. If your design goal is to have a single VMware Dynamic Environment Manager deployment for both on-premises and cloud-hosted VMs, Distributed File System (DFS) replication is recommended. This model provides IT with a single point of administration, while keeping configuration and user data geographically near the VMs accessing the data.

Figure F2: VMware Dynamic Environment Manager Deployment Options

For more information about configuring DFS for multi-site VMware Dynamic Environment Manager deployments, see VMware Workspace ONE and VMware Horizon Reference Architecture.