Template Types and Guest OS Requirements

There are two types of templates in RAS VDI: Virtual desktop and RD Session Host. They are described below.

Virtual desktop

Virtual desktop templates are the essential part of the Parallels RAS VDI. They are used to create guest VMs for publishing of desktops, applications, documents, etc. The guest OS support is the same as for RAS Guest Agent (which must be installed in a VM). See Software Requirements.

Guest VMs created from a Virtual desktop template normally serve a single user. They are managed entirely from within the RAS VDI, which includes such features as creating persistent VMs, managing VDI sessions, publishing resources from a specific Virtual desktop template, and others.

RD Session Host

RD Session Host templates are designed specifically to give you the ability to replicate RD Session Hosts running in virtual machines. Guest VMs created from an RD Session Host template are treated by Parallels RAS almost like regular RD Session Hosts. The main difference is, you can create as many guest VMs from a single template as you require, thus automating RD Session Host provisioning according to your needs.

RD Session Host templates are supported on the following VDI platforms:

• Microsoft Hyper-V
• Microsoft Hyper-V Failover Cluster
• VMware VCenter
• VMware ESXi
• Scale Computing HC3
• Nutanix Acropolis
• Microsoft Azure

RD Session Host templates support Windows Server 2008 R2 and newer as a guest OS. Compared to regular RD Session Hosts, servers created from an RD Session Host template do not support earlier versions of Windows Server. The reason is, these servers run in VMs and require the RAS Guest Agent installed in them, so the guest OS requirements are limited by Windows Server versions supported by RAS Guest Agent.

Please note that since RD Session Host templates are designed to complement the traditional RD Session Hosts functionality, the following standard RAS VDI features are not available when using RD Session Host templates:

• Pool management
• Persistent guest VMs
• Session management
• Publishing from a specific Template
• Some other strictly RAS VDI specific features.

For the information on how to provision RD Session Hosts created from a template, see Grouping and Cloning RD Session Hosts.