Administration

Table Of Contents
Disable or Enable a Farm
When you disable a farm, users can no longer launch RDS desktops or applications from the RDS desktop
pools and the application pools that are associated with the farm. Users can continue to use RDS desktops
and applications that are currently open.
You can disable a farm if you plan to do maintenance on the RDS hosts in the farm or on the RDS desktop
and application pools that are associated with the farm. After you disable a farm, some users might still be
using RDS desktops or applications that they opened before you disable the farm.
Procedure
1 In View Administrator, select Resources > Farms.
2 Select one or more farms and click More Commands.
3 Click Enable or Disable.
4 Click OK to confirm.
The status of the RDS desktop pools and application pools that are associated with the farm are now
Unavailable. You can view the status of the pools by selecting Catalog > Desktop Pools or Catalog >
Application Pools.
Recompose an Automated Farm
With the View Composer recompose operation, you can update the machine image of all the RDS hosts in
an automated farm. You can update the hardware settings or the software of the parent virtual machine and
run the recompose operation to have the changes propagated to all the RDS hosts in the farm.
You can make changes to the parent virtual machine without affecting the RDS host linked clones because
the clones are linked to a replica of the parent. The recompose operation deletes the old replica and creates a
new one for the clones to link to. The recompose creates new linked clones, which typically use less storage
because the disk files of linked clones usually grow in size over time.
You can recompose an automated farm but not individual RDS hosts in the farm. You cannot recompose
linked clones to a lower hardware version than their current hardware version.
If possible, schedule recompose operations during off-peak hours because the operation can be time
consuming.
Prerequisites
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Verify that you have a snapshot of a parent virtual machine. You must specify a snapshot when you
recompose. The snapshot can be on the current parent virtual machine or a different one.
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Decide when to schedule the recompose operation. By default, View Composer starts the operation
immediately.
You can schedule only one recompose operation at a time for a farm. You can recompose multiple
farms concurrently.
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Decide whether to force all users to log off as soon as the recompose operation begins or wait for each
user to log off before recomposing that user's machine.
If you force users to log off, View notifies users before they are disconnected and allows them to close
their applications and log off.
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Decide whether to stop provisioning at first error. If you select this option and an error occurs when
View Composer provisions a linked clone, provisioning stops. You can select this option to ensure that
resources such as storage are not consumed unnecessarily.
Chapter 9 Managing Application Pools, Farms, and RDS Hosts
VMware, Inc. 159