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 assignments, 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 assignments, 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. When physical Windows workstations (Desktop or Server OS) have Horizon Agent loaded on them directly, the OpenGL acceleration of the GPU might be limited in some cases:
  • For Intel and AMD GPUs, the Direct3D and OpenGL capabilities of the card can be used in remote sessions.
  • For NVIDIA GeForce GPUs, the Direct3D capabilities is used in the remote session. For OpenGL, see the downloadable tool at https://developer.nvidia.com/designworks or https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-opengl-rdp
  • For systems with more than one GPU, for example, an integrated Intel for general workloads and a discrete AMD or NVIDIA for 3D workloads, deactivate the integrated card so the 3D graphics card is used.
The following NVIDIA series have been tested:
  • NVIDIA Studio Driver 536.99
  • NVIDIA Ampere series
  • NVIDIA Titan series
  • GeForce RTX 40 series
  • GeForce RTX 30 series
  • GeForce RTX 20 series
  • GeForce GTX 16 series
  • GeForce GTX 10 series
  • Quadro Series
  • M4000
  • P4000
  • K620
The following Intel series have been tested:
  • Intel Graphics DCH Driver 101.4644
  • Intel Gen10 series
  • Intel Gen11 series
  • Intel Gen12 series

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 VMware 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 8 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 Overview and Deployment 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.