Understanding Published Desktop Pools

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 8 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. The farm can be an automated farm or a manual farm. 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 8. See "System Requirements for Guest Operating Systems" in the Horizon 8 Installation and Upgrade document.
• Horizon 8 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.