I have been asked to move a pool of linked clones from one host to another so as to re-purpose the host that they are on and was hoping for a bit of help in finding the correct procedure and estimate any impact or downtime it will cause.
If they are on shared storage you could simply vmotion them to the other host provided that host can also see the storage.
The hosts are not in a cluster and data is on local storage. I attempted to simply vmotion them to the new host however over the weekend the machines migrated back to the original host.
From the research I have done It looks like I can move the pools to a different datastore in a cluster by editing the available datastores and running a re-balance: VMware KB: Migrating linked clone pools to a different or new datastore But that only changes datastores and not the host the resource pool is on.. Basically having the machines running on Host 1 and using storage on Host 2. Unless I am mistaken.
In that case you would need to edit the desktop pool storage options, select the local storage of the new host and de select the local storage of the old host. You would then have to perform a recompose on the machines which should rebuild them on the new storage located on the new host. I would try the recompose on a single VM first to make sure the process goes smoothly. When you do a recompose the VM is set back to default of the parent VM so hopefully your using roaming profiles or one of the persistent disk modes to cover that.
In View, Pools are allocated to Datastores. Never to hosts (of course you have to select a host or cluster to see it's datastores).
If multiple hosts in a cluster share a datastore, they all recieve a piece of the pie.
If you want a pool to only go to a very specific host, this can only be achieved when the datastore you select is unique to that host.
