Introduction to VMware Horizon Farm

VMware Horizon Farms are collection of host providing Remote Desktop Services. A VMware Horizon Farms can have a variable number of RDS hosts providing a common set of applications or Desktops. Before deploying Application or RDS Pool you must specify a farm. Farms also simplifies the management of RDS host, RDS desktops and applications. An administrator can have have a maximum of 200 farms in a VMware Horizon pod and each Horizon Pod can have maximum of 200 RDS Hosts. Farms provides a conveniences of Load Balancing, Redundancy &  Scalability to the administrator

Type of Farms

VMware Horizon provides flexibility to administrators to create Manual or Automated farms depending on enterprise requirements.

Manual Farm

A Manual Farm can have Physical or Virtual RDS host  that already exist in the infrastructure. You need to manually add these RDS hosts at the time of creating a Farm.

Automated Farm

An Automated Farm consist of RDS hosts that are linked clone of Virtual machines in vCenter Server. Leveraging View Composer, new RDS hosts are cloned from a single parent virtual machine and are linked to the parent virtual machine reducing the amount of storage requirement. Automated farms support the View Composer recompose operation but do not support the refresh or re-balance operation. You can recompose an automated farm but not a subset of the RDS hosts in the farm

So in this post we just covered the Introduction to VMware Horizon Farm, I will be covering the deployment of VMware Horizon Farms ( Automated and Manual ) in upcoming post. Hope this is informative for you. Happy learning :-).