Route 53 for VMware Horizon on VMware Cloud on AWS

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like http://www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other.

We will use Route 53 to create a DNS record that will point us to a public IP address we are requesting via VMware Cloud on AWS and pointing to our UAG.

With Route 53 we have three options. Either register a new domain or transfer an existing domain to Route 53 or you can just create a hosted zone with your existing domain. We created a domain under GoDaddy to create a domain but want to use route 53 for the global DNS. So we created a new hosted zone. By creating this hosted zone, AWS will provide NS entries

We need these NS values and put them into the domain DNS configuration under the GoDaddy account. That way we can use AWS Route 53 as a DNS server.

Now that we have a hosted zone in AWS Route 53 we can create A records. But we will come back to that point.
In our Horizon environment, we have a UAG server and a Connection Server. We can now request a public IP in VMC and then NAT it to our UAG to make it public accessible.

Request a Public IP is really easy.

This Public IP we will use to create a NAT rule now. Before i can create the NAT rule i need to find out the internal IP of my UAG Server:

Now that we know it is on the 192.168.40.4 we can create a appropriate NAT rule.

Back in the VMC console under Netowrking & Security We click on NAT.

With this we have the public IP adress that will point to our UAG. Now we can create a DNS record pointing to this Public IP address.

Going back to the AWS console under Route 53 the newly created hosted zone we can click on ” Create A record” We will create a new A record for horizon.vdionvmc.com. By creating a new A record we have different policies we can set.

• Simple routing policy – Use for a single resource that performs a given function for your domain, for example, a web server that serves content for the example.com website.
• Failover routing policy – Use when you want to configure active-passive failover.
• Geolocation routing policy – Use when you want to route traffic based on the location of your users.
• Geoproximity routing policy – Use when you want to route traffic based on the location of your resources and, optionally, shift traffic from resources in one location to resources in another.
• Latency routing policy – Use when you have resources in multiple AWS Regions and you want to route traffic to the region that provides the best latency.
• Multivalue answer routing policy – Use when you want Route 53 to respond to DNS queries with up to eight healthy records selected at random.
• Weighted routing policy – Use to route traffic to multiple resources in proportions that you specify.

Once we have the A record created we need to wait a view minutes until it is propagated to all DNS server.

After a view minutes we can check via a simple nslookup if the dns record is propagated to all public dns hosts:

If it is the case we can try to open a browser an connect to our Horizon environment.

Using Route 53 is an easy way to get a high available global load balancer.