12. Adding Desktop Pool¶
We have configured Active Directory as our Authentication Server, added a “Center” (our VHI Project/Tenant), Synced our available resources on VHI and Configured the Leostream Broker to use the designated Gateway. Now we will be adding a pool. In Leostream a pool is defined as a group of Desktops. We can use pools to create sets of desktops that we want to offer to particular groups of users, or administered by particular individuals. Desktops can be part of more than one pool.
When defining the Pool, we can do it in various ways. In this case we will use “Desktop attributes” in order to filter and group all VDI servers when the name of the server contains “desktop”.
The “desktop” value will help us filter the desktops automatically created by this pool. We know that all desktops will start with desktop-{sequence} as we use this key sequence later to generate new desktops.
The Power Management section of the Pool creation form. Will let us define how many Desktops must be running in our pool at all times. Here we are telling the Broker to keep always on desktop running at all times.
We can tell Leostream to join Virtual Desktops on this Pool with our Active Directory Integration if they are not members yet. Otherwise, if the master image is already a member, we can skip this step.
The Provisioning Parameters section of the pool creation form, allow us to define the project/tenant this pool will belong to, the name-{sequence} of the desktops we will automatically provision, Display name and sequence the number used for the newly provisioned desktops. The next important set of parameters is related to the Availability zone, in our case by default is nova (compute), the flavor (resources allocated to the newly created pool in regards of vCPU, RAM and Swap | check your VHI to check your available flavors or create one that suits your needs), and the master image we will use to deploy the pool. Also, the volume size, volume type and name of the network you’d like the new provisioned desktops to use.
The Provisioning section of the Pool creation form is where we can define the minimum number of provisioned desktops and the maximum number of desktops deployed automatically. Please note we have Provisioning enabled, otherwise we would need to do this manually.
In the above example, when we create the pool 1 desktop will be created, and always 1 desktop will be available on the pool at least. If we delete the desktop automatically one desktop will be provisioned to meet the minimum requirements defined. If we login to the pool and one of the desktops is already in use, another desktop up to a maximum of two will be deployed.
Fig.1.1 As soon as we click on save Pool, a virtual desktop is generated to meet the minimum requirements defined previously.
Fig. 1.2 A second user logs in to the pool and another desktop is provisioned to be able to meet the demand. We have set a limit of two desktops maximum to be provisioned automatically. If a third user tried to log in to the broker, they would not find available resources as per our previous definitions in the pool configuration.
Before any user can access the remote desktops, we have to ensure we have a defined display protocol and that a gateway is part of the protocol. The display protocol is in charge of defining which protocol should be used when connecting to the gateway and desktop pool. We use the RDP protocol in our example, and we can see that our pool uses the “default” protocol in this example. Now we need to tell the Protocol Plan which gateway should use, we will define the one configured earlier.
