An published 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.
A published desktop pool and a published desktop have the following characteristics:
- A published 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 published desktops.
- A published 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.
- A published desktop supports the RDP, PCoIP, and VMware Blast display protocols.
- A published 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 Horizon 7 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 a published 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.
- Published desktops do not support Horizon 7 Persona Management.
