[HorizonAPI] Changing the amount of desktops or RDS hosts in a pool/farm

Sometimes there is a need to change the amount of desktops/rds hosts in a pool/farm. Since doing this in the GUI sucks (although that seems to have gotten slightly better with 7.11) I prefer to do it using the API’s. Let’s start with a Desktop pool.

The easiest way to change pool settings is to use the helper function of a service. After connecting to the connection server we first need to query for the ID of the desktoppool that we need to change.

[VMware.Hv.QueryServiceService]$queryService = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryServiceService
[VMware.Hv.QueryDefinition]$defn = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryDefinition
$defn.queryEntityType = 'DesktopSummaryView'
$defn.Filter = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryFilterEquals -property @{'memberName'='desktopSummaryData.name'; 'value' = "Pod01_Pool01"}
[array]$queryResults= ($queryService.queryService_create($HVservice, $defn)).results
$hvpoolid=$queryResults.id

To actually change the pool it’s the best to use the helper function of a service so we first put the desktopservice into an object

$desktopservice=new-object vmware.hv.DesktopService

The next step is to read the current settings into another object.

$desktophelper=$desktopservice.read($HVservice, $HVPoolID)

If you want to see what’s in here we’ll just do this

$desktophelper | get-member

With the get helper method’s it’s possible to get things while you can change them with their set counterpart. Don’t forget to use brackets when you want to go deeper.

$desktophelper.getAutomatedDesktopDataHelper() | get-member

And we can go on and on with this but I happen to already have found where the amount of desktops is listed.

$desktophelper.getAutomatedDesktopDataHelper().getVmNamingSettingsHelper().getPatternNamingSettingsHelper() | get-member

Let’s take a look at the getMaxNumberOfMachines method.

$desktophelper.getAutomatedDesktopDataHelper().getVmNamingSettingsHelper().getPatternNamingSettingsHelper().getMaxNumberOfMachines()

And we can actually use this with setMaxNumberOfMachines

$desktophelper.getAutomatedDesktopDataHelper().getVmNamingSettingsHelper().getPatternNamingSettingsHelper().setMaxNumberOfMachines(10)

But nothing has changed yet (and yes I am lazy so I will show it using the vmware.hv.helper module.

(get-hvpool -PoolName pod01_pool01).automateddesktopdata.VmNamingSettings.PatternNamingSettings

To apply the change to 10 vm’s we need to apply the helper using the update method

$desktopservice.update($hvservice, $desktophelper)

And when we check this with get-hvpool.

And we can do almost the same for RDS farms just a few details that are different in the naming of various objects.

[VMware.Hv.QueryServiceService]$queryService = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryServiceService
[VMware.Hv.QueryDefinition]$defn = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryDefinition
$defn.queryEntityType = 'FarmSummaryView'
$defn.Filter = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryFilterEquals -property @{'memberName'='data.name'; 'value' = "pod1_rds_IC"}
[array]$queryResults= ($queryService.queryService_create($HVservice, $defn)).results
$hvfarmid=($queryResults).id

(Get-HVFarm -FarmName pod1_rds_ic).automatedfarmdata.RdsServerNamingSettings.PatternNamingSettings

[VMware.Hv.FarmService]$farmservice=new-object vmware.hv.FarmService
$farmhelper=$farmservice.read($HVservice, $HVFarmID)
$farmhelper.getAutomatedFarmDataHelper().getRdsServerNamingSettingsHelper().getPatternNamingSettingsHelper().setMaxNumberOfRDSServers(3)
$farmservice.update($HVservice, $farmhelper)