With Windows-based farms, you can use Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) to provide published desktops on RDS hosts and deliver published applications to many users. You can also provide published desktops and applications from a farm of Linux-based multi-session hosts.
Multi-session Host
The following types of machines can serve as multi-session hosts.
- Windows-based server computers that have Windows Remote Desktop Services (RDS) and Horizon Agent installed. These servers host applications that users can access remotely.
- Linux-based machines running a Linux distribution that supports multi-session capabilities, as described in Considerations for Linux Farms, Published Desktops, and Published Applications.
Farms
A farm is a collection of multi-session hosts. Farms facilitate the management of hosts, along with the published desktops and applications provisioned from those hosts, across an enterprise. Farms provide a common set of published applications or published desktops to serve groups of users that vary in size or have different desktop or application requirements.
When you create a published desktop or application pool, you must specify one and only one farm. The hosts in a farm can host published desktops, applications, or both. A farm can support at most one published desktop pool, but it can support multiple application pools. A farm can support desktop pools and application pools simultaneously.
Farms can have a variable number of multi-session hosts. See VMware Configuration Maximums for the maximum number of host machines supported per farm. VMware Horizon 8 provides load balancing of the hosts in a farm by directing connection requests to the host that has the least number of active sessions.
Published Desktop Pool
A published desktop pool is provisioned from a farm of multi-session host machines. Each published desktop can support multiple user sessions at a time.
Published desktops require fewer virtual machine resources than single-session virtual desktops. A published desktop is based on a session to a multi-session host. In contrast, a desktop in an single-session desktop pool is based on a virtual machine.
Published Application Pool
A published application pool runs on a farm of multi-session host machines.
With a published application pool, you can deliver a single application to many users simultaneously. When you create a published application pool, you deploy an application in the data center that users can access from anywhere on the network.
Published Applications on Demand
Published applications on demand are attached to an available Windows RDS host only at the time a user launches an application. Additionally, users' applications are activated only within their session. By removing the need to plan for grouping applications to farms, this model minimizes the number of hosts required to support your users and their applications as well as associated infrastructure costs and management time.
