In flexVDI a Pool is a set of CPUs and a certain amount of RAM provided by one or more Hosts. The Guests are always assigned to one of these Pools, that provides them the with necessary resources. Besides its name and the list of Hosts from which it takes its resources, the basic information of a Pool includes these two important properties:

Priority: Indicates the preference that a Pool has for acquiring resources when there are not enough to fulfill the needs of every Pool. This happens when some of the Hosts are down, due to a failure or for maintenance. In that situation, when reassigning the remaining resources to Pools, those

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with higher priority (lower value) come first.

"CPU block size" / "RAM block size": It is the resource reservation unit used by the Pool. Reservation is done in blocks of this size. For instance, the Pool in the image reserves resources from the Hosts in blocks of 1 CPU and 2GB of RAM.  The purpose of these values is to ensure that Pools reserve Host resources for the Guests in an adequate proportion. This will prevent, for instance, that a Pool reserves a large number of CPUs but a small amount of RAM in a Host. The RAM would limit the amount Guests that could run in the Pool, rendering the rest of the reserved CPUs unusable. These resource reservations are made:

• Initially when the Pool is created or the Manager starts.
• Automatically when the amount of available resources changes. For instance, on the event of failure or shutdown of one of the Hosts. High priority Pools may receive resources that are removed from Pools with a lower priority.
  
• By explicit request of an administrator clicking on "Rebalance resources" from the context menu of a Pool.

The graphs on the right show the used and available resources for creating and executing Guests handled by the Pool:

• Required: the amount of resources (CPU / RAM) assigned to the Pool.
• Present: the current amount of resources available to the Pool. It may be less than the Required value, for instance if one of the Host is off for maintenance.  
• In use / Free shows the amount of resources that Are being used by the Guests in the Pool, and the amount that is still available. The total amount is equal to "Present".

The resources that are assigned to a Pool, can be used by the Guests in that Pool and are not available to Guests in other Pools. Plan your Pools thoroughly and ahead of time, so that the platform will respond in the best way when a Host fails.

Creating a Pool

Before you can create a Guest, you need to create a Pool to host for it; to do this, click on the icon Pool of the top bar, or open the "Guest / Host / Pool" section in the left area of the Dashboard and click the right mouse button on "Pools". Then click "New Pool".

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A window will open to start the creation of the new Pool.

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Enter the name of the Pool and click "Next".

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You can select the Hosts you want to associate with the new Pool Press "Next".

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In this window you can select the amount of resources that the Pool will reserve from the Hosts to run its Guests:

• CPU reservation block size
• RAM reservation block size
• The amount of "reservation blocks" that this Pool will reserve from the Hosts.
• Priority. You can assign a priority to the Pools according to the availability of resources that we want to provide to its Guests. Resources assigned to a Pool with a High priority will be available for it, but will be denied for Pools with low priorities when resources are scarce.