Architecture Planning

Table Of Contents
Managing Desktop and Application
Pools from a Central Location 3
You can create pools that include one or hundreds or thousands of remote desktops. As a desktop source,
you can use virtual machines, physical machines, and Windows Remote Desktop Services (RDS) hosts.
Create one virtual machine as a base image, and View can generate a pool of remote desktops from that
image. You can also create pools of applications that give users remote access to applications.
This chapter includes the following topics:
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“Advantages of Desktop Pools,” on page 29
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“Advantages of Application Pools,” on page 30
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“Reducing and Managing Storage Requirements,” on page 31
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“Application Provisioning,” on page 36
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“Using Active Directory GPOs to Manage Users and Desktops,” on page 38
Advantages of Desktop Pools
View offers the ability to create and provision pools of desktops as its basis of centralized management.
You create a remote desktop pool from one of the following sources:
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A physical system such as a physical desktop PC or an RDS host
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A virtual machine that is hosted on an ESXi host and managed by vCenter Server
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A virtual machine that runs on a virtualization platform other than vCenter Server that supports View
Agent
If you use a vSphere virtual machine as a desktop source, you can automate the process of making as many
identical virtual desktops as you need. You can set a minimum and maximum number of virtual desktops to
be generated for the pool. Setting these parameters ensures that you always have enough remote desktops
available for immediate use but not so many that you overuse available resources.
Using pools to manage desktops allows you to apply settings or deploy applications to all remote desktops
in a pool. The following examples show some of the settings available:
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Specify which remote display protocol to use as the default for the remote desktop and whether to let
end users override the default.
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If using a virtual machine, specify whether to power off the virtual machine when it is not in use and
whether to delete it altogether.
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Specify whether to use a Microsoft Sysprep customization specification or QuickPrep from VMware.
Sysprep generates a unique SID and GUID for each virtual machine in the pool.
VMware, Inc.
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