Parallels RAS Farm and Sites

A site is a Parallels RAS deployment consisting of at least the following components installed on the same (simplest scenario) or multiple servers:

• Master RAS Publishing Agent
• RAS Secure Client Gateway
• RAS Console

A site belongs to a farm, which is the the top-level object in the Parallels RAS object hierarchy. A farm consists of at least one site, but can have multiple sites that can be managed from the same instance of the Parallels RAS Console.

When you install Parallels RAS for the first time, a farm with a single site is created automatically. This first site also becomes the Licensing Server where the main Parallels RAS configuration database is stored. The data in this database is automatically synchronized with every additional site that you add to the farm. When changes are applied to a particular site, the main configuration database is automatically updated to reflect the changes.

When you install Parallels RAS using default installation options, the required site components listed above are automatically installed on the server on which you perform the installation. You can then add additional sites to the farm if needed and add additional components to a site according to your requirements.

A site deployment consisting of components listed above cannot yet serve remote applications, desktop, and documents. To offer the resources to your users, you need to add at least one Terminal Server to the site. This is accomplished by installed RAS Terminal Server Agent on a server and configuring the necessary services in it. These tasks are easily performed in the RAS Console as you will learn later in this chapter. A more advanced deployment may also include one or more VDI hosts with RAS VDI Agent installed on each host and Windows PCs with RAS PC Agents.

Read this chapter to learn how to add sites to a farm and how to configure and manage them.