The Horizon View replica server, as the name suggests, is a replica or a copy of a view connection server and serves two key roles.

The first role is to enable high availability for your Horizon view environment. Having a replica of your view connection server means that, if a connection server fails, a replica server will take over the management of connection requests so that end users are still able to connect to their virtual desktop machines.

Secondly, adding replica servers allows you to scale up the number of users and virtual desktop connections. An individual instance of a connection server can support 2,000 connections, so adding additional connection servers allows you to add another 2,000 users at a time, up to the maximum of five connection servers and 10,000 users per Horizon view pod. We will discuss the Pod and Block architecture in Chapter 3, Design and Deployment Considerations.

As with the security server, you will see that the installation process is again almost the same as the connection server, but this time, you select the replica server role from the drop-down menu during installation.