About Sites

A Parallels RAS farm consists of at least one site, but may have as many sites as necessary.

Sites are often used to separate management and/or location functions. For example, by creating a site, you can delegate permissions to a site admin without granting them full farm permissions. Or you can have separate sites for different physical locations with the ability to copy the same settings to each site while using Terminal Servers, VDI hosts, or PCs that are closer to end users or (depending on your needs) to back-end servers. For instance, it would make sense for a client/server application querying a database to be published from a Terminal Server which is located closer to the database server.

Each site is completely isolated from other sites within the same farm. The farm simply groups the sites logically and stores configuration properties of each site (and the objects that comprise it) in a single database. Sites don't communicate with each other and don't share any objects or data. The only exception to this rule is the RAS Licensing Server site which periodically communicates with other sites to obtain statistics.

Individual object settings in a given site can be replicated to all other sites. This does not mean that the settings will be shared between sites. The settings that you choose will simply be applied to other sites. For more information, see the Managing Sites section.

When you install Parallels Remote Application Server for the first time, a farm with a single site is created automatically. This first site becomes the RAS Licensing Server site and the host for the main Parallels RAS configuration database. When you add more sites to the farm, the data in this database is automatically synchronized with every site that you add. When changes are applied to a particular site, the main configuration database is automatically updated to reflect the changes.

Each site must have at least the following components installed:

• Master RAS Publishing Agent
• RAS Secure Client Gateway
• Terminal Server, VDI, or PC
• Published resources (applications, desktops, documents).

When you install Parallels RAS using default installation options, the master RAS Publishing Agent and the RAS Secure Client Gateway are automatically installed on the server on which you perform the installation. You can then add one or more Terminal Servers to the site and publish resources hosted by those servers. You can also add more sites to the farm if needed and configure individual components for each site as you desire.