Preferred Sites and Cloud Pod Architecture in Horizon 8

Starting with the Horizon 8 2606 release, a preferred site is an administrator-defined, ordered list of Cloud Pod Architecture sites that Horizon 8 searches, in priority order, when a user's initial site cannot satisfy a desktop or application request.

Preferred sites extend the existing site-search order. Horizon 8 searches sites in the following priority:

1. The user's initial (connecting) site.
2. The user's home site, if one is configured. See Home Sites and Cloud Pod Architecture in Horizon 8.
3. The site's configured preferred sites, in the order you rank them.
4. All remaining sites in the pod federation, selected at random or according to the global entitlement's Session Load Distribution policy, if one is configured. See Understanding Session Load Distribution Policy.

If no preferred sites are configured, or none of the configured preferred sites have available resources, Horizon 8 falls back to this existing search behavior.

Requirements

Preferred sites apply only to global desktop and global application entitlements with a scope policy of All Sites. See Understanding the Scope Policy in Global Entitlements.

Note: Preferred sites are not used by default. To enable preferred-site searching for a global entitlement, you must select the Use Preferred Sites option when you create or modify the global entitlement.

Configuring preferred sites

You configure the ordered list of preferred sites on a per-site basis, in Horizon Console, when you create or edit a site. See Create and Configure a Site in Horizon Console.

Ignoring high-load preferred sites

When you enable Use Preferred Sites for a global entitlement, you can also select Ignore Preferred Sites with High Load and specify a load threshold (0–100). If a preferred site's current load exceeds this threshold, Horizon 8 skips that site and continues to the next preferred site, or to the remaining-sites fallback if none qualify.

The threshold is configured using the global LDAP field pae-LoadThresholdForSite (under CN=Common,OU=Global,OU=Properties. which stores an integer percentage, for instance, a value of 98 represents 98% load. By default, the setting is 98, though administrators can configure anywhere from 0 to 100.

Important: This option requires a Session Load Distribution policy (Load Index or Session Count) to be configured on the global entitlement, as Horizon uses it to determine each site's current load.

Scenarios

Scenario 1: session loaded from the first preferred site

No session is available in the current site, Site 3 (India). Horizon loads the session from the first configured preferred site, Site 2 (UK).

Scenario 2: first preferred site overloaded, session loaded from the second preferred site

No sessions are available in the current site, Site 3 (India), and the first preferred site, Site 2 (UK), is overloaded. Horizon loads the session from the second preferred site, Site 3 (US).

Preferred sites apply only to global entitlements scoped to All Sites; site priority has no meaning within a single site or pod scope.