Entitling Users and Groups in the Pod Federation in Horizon 8

In a Cloud Pod Architecture environment, you create global entitlements to entitle users or groups to multiple desktops and applications across multiple pods in the pod federation.

In a traditional VMware Horizon 8 environment, you use Horizon Console to create local entitlements. These local entitlements entitle users and groups to a specific desktop or application pool on a Connection Server instance.

In a Cloud Pod Architecture environment, you do not need to configure and manage local entitlements. Global entitlements simplify administration, even in a pod federation that contains a single pod. Global entitlements are stored in the Global Data Layer. Because global entitlements are shared data, global entitlement information is available on all Connection Server instances in the pod federation.

You entitle users and groups to desktops by creating global desktop entitlements. Each global desktop entitlement contains a list of member users or groups, a list of the desktop pools that can provide desktops for entitled users, and a scope policy. The desktop pools in a global entitlement can be either floating or dedicated pools. You specify whether a global entitlement is floating or dedicated during global entitlement creation.

You entitle users and groups to applications by creating global application entitlements. Each global application entitlement contains a list of the member users or groups, a list of the application pools that can provide applications for entitled users, and a scope policy.

A global entitlement's scope policy specifies where Horizon 8 looks for desktops or applications when it allocates desktops or applications to users in the global entitlement. It also determines whether Horizon 8 looks for desktops or applications in any pod in the pod federation, in pods that reside in the same site, or only in the pod to which the user is connected.

As a best practice, you should not configure local and global entitlements for the same desktop pool. For example, if you create both local and global entitlements for the same desktop pool, the same desktop might appear as a local and a global entitlement in the list of desktops and applications that Horizon Client shows to an entitled user. Similarly, you should not configure both local and global entitlements for application pools created from the same farm.