Desktop Pools

VMware Horizon offers the ability to create and provision pools of desktops as its basis of centralized management.

You create a desktop pool from one of the following sources:

• A virtual machine that is hosted on an ESXi host and managed by vCenter Server.
• A session-based desktop on an RDS host. For more information about creating desktop pools from an RDS host, see the Setting Up Published Desktops and Applications in Horizon in Horizon document.
• A non-vSphere machine such as a physical desktop PC.
• A virtual machine that runs on a virtualization platform other than vCenter Server that supports Horizon Agent.

If you use a vSphere virtual machine as a desktop source, you can automate the process of making as many identical virtual desktops as you need. You can set a minimum and maximum number of virtual desktops to be generated for the pool. Setting these parameters ensures that you always have enough remote desktops available for immediate use but not so many that you overuse available resources.

Using pools to manage desktops allows you to apply settings or deploy applications to all remote desktops in a pool. For more information about desktop pools of virtual machines or unmanaged machines, see the Setting Up Virtual Desktops in Horizon document. For more information about desktop pools based on sessions on RDS hosts, see the Setting Up Published Desktops and Applications in Horizon document.