A registered physical machine is a physical computer that has Horizon Agent installed and is then registered with Connection Server.

Creating a manual desktop pool that contains registered physical machines provides end users access to their corporate physical computers remotely in a convenient and secure manner. Teleworkers who need access to their physical machines that reside within the corporate office can also access their machines without requiring to be on VPN and compromising security.

Both floating and dedicated user assignments are supported. With dedicated-assignment, you can also manually assign individual desktops so that each employee is connected to their own physical machine. You can also create a manual desktop pool with a single registered physical machine to enable single user access for the physical machine in the desktop pool.

With dedicated-assignment, you can also assign multiple users to each physical machine in a desktop pool so that shift workers can share the same desktop instead of reserving the dedicated machine for each user.

Physical machines support NVIDIA GPUs and encoders. Physical machines can also directly leverage GPU capability available to the Horizon Agent operating system. For more information, see the VMware Knowledge Base (KB) article https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/78690.

The following NVIDIA series have been tested:
  • NVIDIA Studio Driver 462.59
  • NVIDIA Titan Series
  • GeForce 30 series
  • GeForce 20 series
  • GeForce 16 Series
  • GeForce 10 Series
  • NVIDIA Quadro Driver R460 U7 (462.59)
  • NVIDIA RTX Series
  • M4000
  • P4000
  • K620

Complete the following steps in the workflow to create a manual desktop pool that contains registered physical machines.

  • Prepare the physical machine to deliver remote desktop access. Before you add this physical machine to a manual desktop pool, you must prepare each machine individually. Horizon Agent must be installed and running on each machine. To prepare non-vSphere virtual machines, see Prepare a non-vSphere Machine For Horizon 8 Management.
  • Gather the configuration information that you must provide to create the pool. See Worksheet for Creating a Manual Desktop Pool. The following options are not supported for manual desktop pools that contain registered physical machines:
    • Power policies are not supported.
    • PCoIP is not supported.
  • Create the manual desktop pool and select the Other sources option to select the registered non-vSphere virtual machine as the desktop pool source. See Create a Manual Desktop Pool.
  • Entitle users to access the manual desktop pool. See "Entitling Users and Groups" in the Horizon Administration document.
  • Perform management tasks on non-vSphere registered machines. See Managing non-vSphere Registered Machines.
Note: Manual desktop pools that contain registered physical machines supports Wake-on-LAN. This feature enables the entitled user to wake up the physical machine while connecting from Connection Server. Wake-on-LAN is supported with the VMware Blast protocol for dedicated-assignment manual desktop pools that contain registered physical machines. For more information about Wake-on-LAN, see "VMware Blast Extreme" in the Horizon Architecture Planning document.

For more information about using physical machines, see the "Using Horizon 7 to Access Physical Windows Machines" document available at https://techzone.vmware.com.