Linked Clone -> Fullclone

[orczakm]

Hey volks,

We had the situation here that a linked desktop pool was migrated to a fullclone pool by doing the following steps.

1. Deactivate the affected Linked Clone Pool in VMware View

2. Shutdown all Virtual Machines of the affected pool

3. clone each linked clone to a full clone.

4. Create a manual Pool and add the fullclones

5. Assign the user that was associated before with the linked clone, now with the fullclone

That was done successfully for the 40 clients. Afterwards we want delete the linked clone pool. But stop, as we know - when linked clones get deleted (as example when deleting a whole pool) vmview delete also the associated computer account in the active directory, this does not happen with fullclones. We tested if it would work to move the computer accounts into another ou where view has no rights, unfortunately vmview uses the owner rights (assigned when creating the virtual desktop as linked clone) to delete the object. If this happens our fullclones have no active directory computer accounts, bad idea we think

As we have no idea at the moment how to handle this challenge, we shout this into the net, let's see if somebody have a idea how to accomplish this task successfully

Greetz,

Matthias

[mittim12]

If View does remove the accounts from the domain why couldn't you just go back in and rejoin the domain with the full clones?  

[orczakm]

Hey

Because then the administrative account that is usually used by vmview to create the computer accounts in active directory is not used, and this will cause issues when working out of the vmview with the desktops we believe. Are we wrong? Does anybodyy know (or has some reference to vm-articles) where the process is described that is used to generate the computer accounts?

[mittim12]

I don't think it will cause any issues.   View just handles it for you to simplify the creation and the deployment of the machines but it should be no different then you logging and joining the domain.  

[orczakm]

i think it will cause issues -> when view deletes the computer account, and we add them again, it will get a new ID in AD, right? This ID is not matching the stored ID in View DB, am i right?

Also, we do not know what exactly happens when the pool is created in the process of adding the computer account in AD.

[mittim12]

What is stored in the Composer database is a moot point because your deleting the clones.      The full desktops have no dependency on the View Composer database.     The easiest thing to do would be to test it in your environment and see if you experience any issues.  

[cgrubbe]

I migrated about 20 linked clones to full VM's when moving them from one View system to another, so I didn't have the same concern about the computer object being removed from AD when the pool (or VM) was deleted.   I would think that you should be able to manually remove the linked clones from your View system using the steps described in KB 2015112 http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=201511... Of course skipping the part about removing the Computer Accounts from AD.

-Chris