QUESTION: VMWare Horizon 8 Instant Clones with persistend user disk/profiles

[StadtHS]

Hello there,

At the moment we are using VMWare Horizon 7.13 with Linked Clones.

Now we are forced to update our environment to VMWare Horizon 8 with Instant Clones. So the Linked Clones are not supported anymore, we have to rethink.

For us it is important to work with user profiles, because we have so many applications that still need a persistent user disk. 

What is best practice? I have read about FSLogix (more costs for us), Dynamic Environment Manager, or Roaming Profiles (could be very slow). 

This is definitely not a solution we can work with. Can someome lead us to the right direction=?

Thanks in advance

Sven

[RyanHardy · Accepted solution]

Well, we were in the same boat: about 100 users with persistent disks in (dedicated) Linked Clone VMs. We have been using Roaming Profiles though for years and they are just fine. Sure, users with huge profiles (mostly caused by huge .pst files) are gonna see some additional seconds but they should be punished for using it wrong anyways. 🙂

Anyway, we made the switch to (dedicated) Instant Clones and it behaves just like we're used to with Linked Clones.

[Jubish-Jose]

I will highly recommend FSLogix for user profile and data and DEM for user settings. We are using it for some time and its quite stable. 

[StadtHS]

So you are using dedicated ICs with roaming profiles? 

[RyanHardy]

Yes, that's right. But we are using VDI "wrong" anyway the whole time because our needs just don't fit the floating disposable VM scenarios. User experience (at least for us) is not good enough with disposable VMs.

Right in the beginning, about 6 years ago now, I tried using floating Linked Clones with persistent user disks but that was a complete mess - just a few days into production use the first profiles were lost because Horizon was unable to put the right things together. We reverted to using VDI old school with roaming profiles, just like the physical desktops were using too. As our VDI hosts are all connected with 10g to the server cluster hosting the file server, loading the roaming profile (somewhere between 50mb and 4gb) was never a big issue.

Besides dedicated Instant Clones we also host some customized VMs in a manual pool - these would be the ones that need special applications like Adobe Creative Cloud or things like that.

[Jon_Holloway]

If you haven't already seen it, this document on TechZone covers a number of different migration scenarios related to moving to Instant Clones and some options for user profiles - https://via.vmw.com/tchzmno2735.

Jon