You can use sites to help the Universal Broker service determine how best to broker remote resources to your end users. A site is a collection of cloud-connected pods in the same physical location, typically in a single data center.
Configuring Sites and Home Sites
By default, a Horizon pod (based on Horizon Connection Server technology) is placed in monitored state. When you change a pod from monitored to managed state to support the creation of assignments, you are prompted to associate the pod with a new or existing site.
When you select Universal Broker as the brokering method for your Horizon Cloud pods in Microsoft Azure, it creates a default site called Default-Site. Participating Horizon Cloud pods are automatically added to the Default-Site. Later, you can configure new sites and move pods from the Default-Site to a configured site.
You can also associate a user or a group of users with a specific site, called a home site.
Sites can serve as a useful part of a disaster recovery solution. For example, you can add pods in different data centers to different sites and entitle users and groups to an assignment that spans those sites. If a data center in one site becomes unavailable, Universal Broker can identify desktops from an available site to fulfill user requests.
Use the Horizon Universal Console to configure sites and home sites. See Configuring Sites for Universal Broker and Configuring Home Sites for Universal Broker.
Using Sites to Define Desktop Search Behavior
When a user accesses an assignment, Universal Broker searches for an available desktop from the pools participating in that assignment. By default, Universal Broker gives preference to the user's home site, the site physically closest to the user, and other sites, in that order.
For assignments that contain dedicated desktop pools, Universal Broker uses the default search behavior only the first time a user requests a desktop. After Universal Broker routes the user's request to a dedicated desktop in this first session, it returns the user directly to the same desktop in subsequent sessions.
You can modify the default search and request routing behavior for individual assignments by configuring site policies and home site overrides. For example, Universal Broker can give preference to the site physically closest to the user instead of the user's home site. Universal Broker can also restrict the scope of the search to desktops from a specific site.
You can also designate a home site override for an assignment. In this case, Universal Broker begins searching for available desktops in the override site instead of the user's home site.
You can configure site policy and home site override settings when you create an assignment, as described in Horizon Pods - Create a Multi-Cloud Assignment of VDI Desktops or Horizon Cloud Pods in Microsoft Azure - Create a VDI Multi-Cloud Assignment in Your Horizon Cloud Tenant Environment. You can also modify existing site policy and home site override settings by editing an assignment, as described in Edit a Multi-Cloud Assignment in Your Horizon Cloud Tenant Environment.
