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 administrator 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 RD Session Hosts, Providers, 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 an RD Session Host which is located closer to the database server.

Each Site is completely isolated from other sites within the same Farm. The Farm simply groups 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 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 settings will be shared between sites. The settings that you choose will simply be applied to other sites. For more information, see the Replicating Site Settings section.

When you install Parallels RAS, a Farm with a single Site is created automatically. This first Site becomes the RAS Licensing 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 in order to publish remote applications and desktops for end users:

• Primary RAS Connection Broker
• RAS Secure Gateway. Note that if a Site is joined as Tenant to RAS Tenant Broker, RAS Secure Gateway is not needed. For details, see RAS Multi-Tenant Architecture.
• RD Session Host, VDI, or PC

When you install Parallels RAS using default installation options, the primary RAS Connection Broker and the RAS Secure Gateway are automatically installed on the server on which you perform the installation. You can then add one or more RD Session Hosts to the Site to host published resources. You can also add more sites to the Farm if needed and configure individual components for each Site as you desire.