6.2

Creating Farms 8
A farm is a group of RDS hosts that provides a common set of applications or RDS desktops to users.
This chapter includes the following topics:
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“Farms,” on page 99
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“Preparing a Parent Virtual Machine for an Automated Farm,” on page 100
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“Worksheet for Creating a Manual Farm,” on page 103
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“Worksheet for Creating an Automated Farm,” on page 104
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“Create a Manual Farm,” on page 109
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“Create an Automated Farm,” on page 109
Farms
Farms simplify the task of managing RDS hosts, RDS desktops, and applications in an enterprise. You can
create manual or automated farms to serve groups of users that vary in size or have different desktop or
application requirements.
A manual farm consists of RDS hosts that already exist. The RDS hosts can be physical or virtual machines.
You manually add the RDS hosts when you create the farm.
An automated farm consists of RDS host that are linked-clone virtual machines in vCenter Server. View
Composer creates the virtual machines based on the parameters that you specify when you create the farm.
The virtual machines are cloned from a single parent virtual machine and are linked to the parent in a
mechanism that reduces the amount of storage that the virtual machines require.
When you create an application pool or an RDS desktop pool, you must specify one and only one farm. The
RDS hosts in a farm can host RDS desktops, applications, or both. A farm can support at most one RDS
desktop pool, but it can support multiple application pools. A farm can support both types of pools
simultaneously.
Farms provide the following conveniences:
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Load balancing
By default, View balances the load of the RDS desktop sessions and the application sessions across all
the RDS hosts in the farm. You can control the placement of new application sessions by writing and
configuring load balancing scripts. For more information, see "Configuring Load Balancing for RDS
Hosts" in the View Administration document.
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Redundancy
If one RDS host in a farm is offline, the other RDS hosts in the farm continue to provide applications
and desktops to users.
VMware, Inc.
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