Understanding RDS Desktop Pools

An RDS desktop pool is one of three types of desktop pools that you can create. This type of pool was known as a Microsoft Terminal Services pool in previous Horizon 7 releases.

An RDS desktop pool and an RDS desktop have the following characteristics:

• An RDS desktop pool is associated with a farm, which is a group of RDS hosts. Each RDS host is a Windows server that can host multiple RDS desktops.
• An RDS desktop is based on a session to an RDS host. In contrast, a desktop in an automated desktop pool is based on a virtual machine, and a desktop in a manual desktop pool is based on a virtual or physical machine.
• An RDS desktop supports the RDP, PCoIP, and VMware Blast display protocols. To enable HTML Access, see "Prepare Desktops, Pools, and Farms for HTML Access," in the "Setup and Installation" chapter in the Using HTML Access document, available from https://www.vmware.com/support/viewclients/doc/viewclients_pubs.html.
• An RDS desktop pool is only supported on Windows Server operating systems that support the RDS role and are supported by Horizon 7. See "System Requirements for Guest Operating Systems" in the View Installation document.
• Horizon 7 provides load balancing of the RDS hosts in a farm by directing connection requests to the RDS host that has the least number of active sessions.
• Because an RDS desktop pool provides session-based desktops, it does not support operations that are specific to a linked-clone desktop pool, such as refresh, recompose, and rebalance.
• If an RDS host is a virtual machine that is managed by vCenter Server, you can use snapshots as base images. You can use vCenter Server to manage the snapshots. The use of snapshots on RDS host virtual machines is transparent to Horizon 7.
• RDS desktops do not support Horizon 7 Persona Management.
• The copy and paste feature is disabled by default for HTML Access. To enable the feature, see "HTML Access Group Policy Settings" in the chapter "Configuring HTML Access for End Users" in the Using HTML Access document, available from https://www.vmware.com/support/viewclients/doc/viewclients_pubs.html.