Instant / Linked Clone Master Image Snapshot Mgmt

[mrstorey303]

I'm interested to know what strategies you all employ for master image and snapshot management for VDI.

I often see master images for linked / instant clone pools with a large number of snapshots sat on them where VMs are directly provisioned from - obviously continuing to add to the snapshot tree is not sustainable, so I wondered what processes you employ for ongoing snap mgmt and updates to VDI pools.

Guessing it'd probably be a good idea to clone the latest master VM snap out to a new vm, snap and push from there?  That way you can prune / kill off any snaps off that are considered too old to ever roll back to, without worrying about breaking the instant clone / snap relationship on a live pool.

What do you all do?

[Magneet]

Clone and deploy indeed. Even better, we clone before the last optimization but with all updates so if we need to fix something that can be done pdq. This clone is also used in the test fase before the image goes online. I have also seen customers rebuilding the image every time with RES AM, they use a fairly recent base image, apply all updates and software that needs to be in the GI and optimize it.

[mrstorey303]

Great - really appreciate hearing your experience with this.  I'm building some automation around cloning and publishing updates to pools across multiple pods, so I wanted to understand and nail the process down before starting to code.

RES AM?  Not heard of that product (or company tbh!) - sounds interesting - do you have product info?

I know Login VSI has a master image build automation product - Login AM - is that what you mean, or is that a competitor?

[Magneet]

Res One Automation it's called these days. It's probably THE product why Ivanti has bought RES: RES ONE Automation | IT Automation for the Enterprise

I have no experience with Login AM but I see it requires SCCM thus a domain and I tend not to add my GI to the domain to avoid stale policies int he GI.

[mrstorey303]

Great thanks, will check it out.

What other products are there in this image management / automation space, and which in your opinion are the leaders?  Particularly ones that are well suited to Horizon / VDI, and would also potentially handle image publishing to multiple pools in multiple locations, with version control etc.

Think I'd be interested in demo'ing a few before we start to properly scale out what we have.

Thanks