Help to understand the "Mount Local" option on App Volumes manager

[zengfuyang]

Any body can help me to understand the "Mount Local" option on App Volumes manager?

I want to know if I enable this option, what effect to my environment and what i can see this effect? Thanks.

[Ray_handels · Accepted solution]

Hey,

What happens here is that Appvolumes will check on what datastore the VDI is located and will attach Appstacks from this datastore (if appstacks reside on this datastore).

This only is of use if you have a storagegroup with mutiple datastores, otherwise it will always pick the 1 appstack you have.

This is mostly done to make sure that you don't have to many data traffic between storages and servers.

[auhank]

We have a ticket open with VMware concerning breakage with "mount local".  Things work fine when the machine receives only appstacks, but we get frequent non-local appstack attachment on machines that have a writable.  Things work this way, but our non-local storage is slower so this is undesired behavior.

AppVolumes 2.9 with View 6.1, linked-clone non-persistent pools with 64-bit Windows 7.

[Ray_handels]

Just for the record. A writable volume can only be placed at one datastore, i cannot be syned (unfortenately) which i think is the biggest issue with writable volumes this far.

So if you have VDI's on multiple datastores it will always have more datastores if you have writables.

[auhank]

Understood, but that isn't directly relevant to the ticket we have with VMware.  The breakage is that appstacks (not writable) sometimes attach from non-local when we have a writable in use. The writable of course comes from non-local, but the appstacks should continue to attach from local (which is always the case if there is no writable). 

[Ray_handels]

Ah oke, understood .

No idea if Jason can elaborate on it. It could be that because you have a writable volume (which is attached first) it sees this as the local storage?? Would be strange though.

After this i checked on our environment but it does do what it says it does. If the machine is on datastore 1 all appstacks are attached from datastore 1 and writable volume is attached from datastore 2.

What full version are you using? Manager that is??

[auhank]

Version 2.9.0.1343.  Not all of the appstacks attach from non-local storage, and sometimes all appstacks attach from local (always from local if there is no writable).  VMware had us change our default auth source in SSO, although this did not change behavior. 

We have other issues with AppVolumes (broken scheduled tasks, interaction problems with SAS and MS Office Access).  VMware tells us that the non-local problem is not familiar to them.  I was fishing in this forum hoping that it was known.

We came off Unidesk where things actually worked.  Per-user attachment of AppVolumes would be nice, but there is a substantial time penalty on login for our disposable linked-clones (our main interest).  Our current plan is to abandon AppVolumes and assess on new releases.