VMware Horizon Community
JHT_Seattle
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Anyone else testing with Instant Clones yet?

I took a working VM we've used for our linked clone pools, updated the agent and made the change to instant clone, nothing else, and now no stacks attach at login (user based assignments, 2.10.0). As a final test I removed the AppVol agent, Horizon agent and VM tools, rebooting after each, reinstalled them all in the reverse order, rebooting after each, recomposed (published) and no change - no stacks attach.

Anyone else?

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3 Replies
JHT_Seattle
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Following up, opened a SR.

Seeing in App Vol Manager system messages "failed to mount [stack]", but not much more than that.

Did I miss a release note that said App Volumes doesn't work with Horizon Instant Clones?

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Ray_handels
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Hmmm that seems to be somewhat of an issue if that is the case.

It seems (but still not sure about that) that we also cannot use it because we are using vGPU and it seems that this is not yet supported with instant clone.

I didn't really do the deep dive into instant cloning but what seems to happen is that it forks into an existing running machine and clone/snapshots this machine so it can use memory and CPU from this machine. It would imply that if you have a running machine with appstacks (assigned to machine) it won't work with instant cloning. But to be honest this is wild guessing.. I would love to see some more info on it here..

Have you tried Appvolumes 3 yet??

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JHT_Seattle
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

We're only using user assignments here, no machine assignments.  Turns out that's a good thing because machine assignments aren't supported at all in 3.0!  Don't know if that'll change down the road or not.

I've got the 3.0 OVA downloaded, but not deployed yet.  Too busy trying to put v7 through its paces... if I can just get this Instant Clone functionality to work a little more smoothly (and get stacks to attach) maybe I'll be motivated to.  So far I like some of the new v7 functionality, but overall I'm still mixed.  VMware is still adding functions without any attention to operational details.  Take the Instant Cloning, for example - no CLI support (so I can't script publishing a new image), and images aren't treated as top-level objects so you have to go into each pool to make a change.  For now there are fun things to play with, but it's just not really usable/scalable.  Sad Smiley Sad  Of the laundry list of bugs and feature requests I gave to VMware 2 years ago, which prompted in person meetings with VPs, etc, I think probably less than 10% have been implemented.  Basic stuff like sort orders (session lengths), multi-select session logoff, tracking client versions - nothing!

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