You use the New Farm wizard in VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure to create a farm
of either Windows Server VMs or Windows 10 or 11 Enterprise multi-session VMs.
One way to start the wizard is to expand Desktop Assignments on the Getting Started page, go
down to Create Desktop Farm, and click New. The other way to open the wizard is to go
to Inventory > Farms and click New. For the farm name, I’m using EntMulti-Farm because
I’m going to use an image for a Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session VM. I’ll shorten
the VM name to just EntMulti, and then when the VMs are created they will take this name
and an incremental number will be added to the VM name.
I’ll leave the farm type as Applications because I’m going to use the farm to provide
published applications. The correct location and pod are already selected.
To use the filter to find VM models, we have tag equals VMware recommended. We’ll leave
that. Otherwise, if we had created some other tag, we could select it here. For example,
in a previous exercise, I created a tag called GPU, for a VM type that is GPU-capable, and
then I could select the model I had tagged as GPU. But for this exercise, we’ll use
the default tag VMware-recommended. You get a list of all the VMware-recommended models.
But you can also search on other things, like the series, the CPU, and you can do searches
using complex logic, so you can click the plus sign to add more criteria.
For disk type, you can choose between SSD and HDD. We’ll leave almost all the defaults.
For this exercise, turn off multi-pod images, since the image I published for this farm
was not a multi-pod image. If we had left it turned on, we would also create a marker
to associate with this particular image version. For image, because I had previously created
only one image that could be used for a farm, that image is already selected. If you had
several images, you would select the one you want here.
For the protocol, we’ll use Blast, by VMware, since it is the best. For preferred client
type, you can choose between the browser-based HTML Access Web Client, and the Horizon Client
installed on endpoint devices. Note the domain option. When I imported the
VM, I did not join it to a domain. I can use this setting in the New Farm wizard to join
the VMs to the domain. We’re not going to encrypt the disks. This
option uses Microsoft Azure Disk Encryption, which in turn uses the BitLocker feature of
Windows. For farm size, we’ll leave the min number
at 1 and increase the max number of VMs to 2. Select the check box I confirm that I have
an eligible license for this Windows OS. Expand the advanced properties to see what they are,
and click NEXT. For management type, choose between scheduled
and session. We’ll leave the default. Recurrence weekly, on Sundays. Concurrent quiescing means
the number of VMs that can go down for maintenance at the same time. The maintenance action is
going to be to restart the VM, though we could choose to have the VM rebuilt.
For power management, we’ll optimize for performance rather than optimizing for power
or trying to balance optimization between performance and power.
At the end of the timeout interval, we’ll have users disconnect rather than log off.
You can create up to 10 power schedules. For example, you might create one schedule that
says you want to have very few VMs powered on during the weekends because you know that
very few users need their published desktops or apps on weekends. We’ll call this schedule
1. For days, we’ll say, Saturday. For minimum number of VMs to make available, we’ll enter
1, and click NEXT. For load balancing, we’ll use the defaults,
but you can click the Info icons to learn more about each setting.
On the Summary page, you can review the rich set of features you’ve configured for your
farm. With Horizon Cloud, you can easily create farms of Windows RDS hosts, which can include
Windows Server VMs as well as Windows 10 and Windows 11 Enterprise multi-session VMs. These
hosts serve multiple user sessions simultaneously, allowing multiple users to connect to the
same published desktop or app. Having a farm of RDS hosts provides scalability and high
availability and enables zero downtime during maintenance periods.
When you click SUBMIT, you see the message “Farm creation in progress,” and are taken
back to the main Farms page. If you put your cursor over the ellipses in the status column,
it says, “In progress.” Click the farm name to go to its details page. Click the
System Activity tab to see the progress of VM creation for each of the VMs in the farm.
Click the description name to see progress logs.
Click the refresh button. I’ve sped things up a little here for the video. When the progress
is complete, click the Session Hosts tab and you’ll see that two VMs have been created.
When the farm is first created, the system deploys the number of VMs specified in the
Max VMs field, and then powers off the VMs except for the number specified for Min VMs.
In this example, you see two VMs being created, and after creation, one of the VMs will be
powered off. When creation of the VMs in the farm is complete,
go back to the main Farms page, and you see a green dot next to the farm name, indicating
that farm creation was successful.