Manage templates (RD Session Hosts)

RD Session Host templates are designed specifically to give you the ability to replicate RD Session Hosts running in virtual machines. Hosts 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 hosts 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
• SC//HyperCore
• Nutanix AHV (AOS)
• Microsoft Azure
• Amazon Web Services

RD Session Host templates support Windows Server 2008 R2 up to Windows Server 2022 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 the following standard RAS VDI features are not available when using RD Session Host templates:

• Pool management
• Persistent hosts
• 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 Manage host pools (RD Session Hosts)