A farm is a group of Windows Remote Desktop Services (RDS) hosts. You can create published desktops associated with a farm. You can also deliver a published application to many users by creating application pools. The published applications in application pools run on a farm of RDS hosts.
You will work with application pools in Module 3 of this lab.
RDSH Farm Types
Farms simplify the task of managing RDS hosts, published desktops, and applications in an enterprise. You can create manual or automated farms to serve groups of users that vary in size or have different desktop or application requirements.
A manual farm consists of RDS hosts that already exist. The RDS hosts can be physical or virtual machines. You manually add the RDS hosts when you create the farm.
An automated farm consists of RDS hosts that are instant-clone virtual machines in vCenter Server.
Instant Clone RDSH Farms
The Horizon Connection Server creates the instant-clone virtual machines based on the parameters that you specify when you create the farm. Instant clones share a virtual disk of a parent VM and therefore consume less storage than full virtual machines. In addition, instant clones share the memory of a parent VM and are created using the vmFork technology.
When you create an application pool or a published desktop pool, you must specify one and only one farm. The RDS hosts in a farm can host published desktops, applications, or both. A farm can support at most one published desktop pool, but it can support multiple application pools. A farm can support both types of pools simultaneously.
Smart Provisioning for Desktop / RDSH Pools
An automated instant clone pool or farm is created directly from an image VM Replica using the vSphere instant clone API without creating any parent VM.
Horizon automatically chooses the type to provision based on :
- Low Density of VMs per host in selected cluster - Created without Parent VMs
- High Density of VMs per host in selected cluster - Created with Parent VMs
Instant Clones without Parent VMs
This is a little slower to provision than a pool created with Parent VMs, but memory and disk space savings offset this.
- No ParentVM created = memory and disk space savings
- Less customization on reboot (ClonePrep)
- Logoff = Reverts snapshot and resets VM PW
- Push Image = Full Sync
Follow the KB to switch provisioning scheme for your Horizon Pool or Farm.
Want to learn more?
The first three minutes of the video provides a technical overview of Instant Clone technology.