Peter Bjork wrote a great post on how to create a Workspace Portal 2.1 HA cluster using internal databases. You’re probably wondering: ‘internal database? Deploying-Workspace-Portal-in-a-High-Availability-That is for testing purposes only?”

VMware Workspace Portal 2.1 documentation recommends the use of an external instance of vPostgres when setting up a high availability (HA) environment. However, since the release of VMware Workspace Portal 2.1 documentation, standalone vPostgres is EOA and no longer available as a standalone product. To address customers’ needs, VMware developed a way to utilize the vPostgres instance located in the VMware Workspace Portal appliance in a HA mode without having to incur additional licensing costs.

In a nutshell:

  • Deploy the first VM.
  • Clone the first VM to another VM.
  • Before starting the VM change the vApp options for like FQDN and IP address.
  • Change firewall settings to allow remote connection for vPostgres.
  • Configure vPostgres to listen on the network interface/all interfaces.
  • Configure database replication.

For a line by line configuration of the Workspace Portal appliances read the full article on the VMware Horizon Tech Blog

To make this work you also need a load balancer, otherwise it won’t function.

UPDATE

Since the internal database wasn’t supported for production environments I asked Peter if this article means that the internal database is supported for production. The simple answer is: Yes!

What is Workspace Portal

VMware Workspace Portal lets you build a self-service app store so users can access virtually any application on any device for better workspace management.

Check out the following video by Rory Clements from VMware’s EUC Business Unit where he demonstrates his Horizon 6 Unified Workspace experience. Rory shows how he is able to access applications in a consistent manner across several different devices he uses on a daily basis. Learn more about this on the VMware site.