itopia Cloud Automation Stack (CAS) now supports creating and managing Dedicated Collection Pools as an alternative to Shared Collection Pools. With Dedicated Collections, each user assigned to the Collection Pool gets their own, dedicated Cloud Desktop host server instance.

Dedicated Collection Pools are available for RDS deployments built on Windows Server 2016 and later.

Dedicated Collections leverage the same underlying Microsoft Remote Desktop Services infrastructure as Shared Collections. The key difference is that a Shared Collection hosts multiple Cloud Desktops on each host server, whereas Dedicated Collections deploy only a single Cloud Desktop to each host server.

Dedicated Collections offer an experience that is more similar to "traditional" VDI, where each user is assigned a specific host machine and there is a 1:1 mapping of users to hosts. In contrast, Shared Collections allow a user to connect to any host in the collection, and administrators can define higher ratios of users:host, such as 5:1 or even 20:1 depending on the workload.

In both Collection types, administrators can configure persistent or non-persistent profiles. This means that users in either Collection type can still have access to their personal documents and settings, or they can be configured with profiles that reset after every logoff.

Dedicated Collection Pools are most useful if there is a specific application that requires users to always connect to the same host. For example, some users may use software whose license is bound to their host ID, or certain management software may be designed to expect that users will always login to the same host computer.

Dedicated Collection Pools may also be a solution for workloads that require high performance, such as 3D rendering with GPU-enabled hosts. Because Dedicated Collection Pools maintain a 1:1 mapping by default, there is no additional configuration necessary to ensure that each user receives a dedicated host computer.

For most standard workloads, Shared Collection Pools will offer greater cost savings by providing higher user-to-CPU density. Shared Collection Pools also offer greater resiliency for server failures, as users can connect to any host in the Collection Pool, whereas in a Dedicated Collection Pool they can only connect to their assigned host.

Dedicated Collection Pools offer many of the same features and configurations as Shared Collection Pools such as using custom images, configuring session settings like clipboard access and session timeouts, and selecting the host server machine type.

Where they differ is that the Collection Pool's Autoscale feature does not apply when users are assigned to servers in a 1:1 ratio. Therefore, Autoscale settings are not available in a Dedicated Collection Pool; a new host server is added to the Collection Pool for each user that is assigned to the Collection Pool.

When considering the use of Dedicated Collections, it is important to consider the following: