Horizon offers the ability to create and provision pools of desktops as its basis of centralized management. 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. You can also specify how users are assigned desktops in a pool.

With single-user desktops, each virtual machine allows a single end-user connection at a time. In contrast, with session-based desktops, one RDSH server can accommodate many concurrent user connections.

We will walk through the process of creating an Instant Clone Desktop Pool. A clone is a copy of a Parent VM with a unique identity of its own, including a MAC address, UUID, and other system information. The VMware Instant Clone Technology improves and accelerates the process of creating cloned VMs over the previous View Composer linked-clone technology. In addition, instant clones require less storage and less expense to manage and update because the desktop is deleted when the user logs out, and a new desktop is created using the latest Parent VM image.