Recomposing a disabled pool

[Zaim33]

Just working through a View 6 upgrade and all has gone well. When we've come to recompose the desktop pools the actions are not starting.

All pools are disabled to stop users logging in, rather than in maintenance mode and it appears the disablement is stopping the recompose from starting. I suppose this makes sense but I wondered if anyone else had this issue?

The reason I ask is because I would expect a disabled pool to disallow user access but to allow administrator tasks.

For info provisioning is enabled and View Composer is running on the vCenter instance. The previous View version is View 5.0.

Any thoughts appreciated. As above I understand why this is just a bit surprised.

[mittim12]

I've seen this behavior before.  I've also seen if a VM is already in maintenance mode and you start a task ,refresh or recompose,  it will not accept the task until the VM has been removed from maintenance mode.

I've actually don't have an issue with nothing working while the pool is disabled.   In my mind when you disable a pool then your disabling everything including potential jobs, task, etc. 

[Zaim33]

Thanks for the response and confirms I'm not going crazy. As I was typing it out it made sense but the maintenance mode piece is slightly annoying. Not a massive problem as you can obviously schedule the recompose and it will place then in maintenance mode until the desktops have be recomposed.

[JackMac4 · Accepted solution]

Zaim33,

The purpose of disabling a pool is to stop everything, but not delete it. You can disable a pool to stop logins and provisioning, queue the operations you want, and re-enable the pool. Because we allow inline maintenance it has never been a real issue. You can always recompose individual desktops or even groups, rather than the entire pool if you need to do maintenance while a pool is in use. Once you've marked VM's for a recompose, of course they will become unavailable for login. There are a number of strategies for doing this to keep things moving while the pool is in use. This has been by design ever since View 4.5ish.

If you need some help figuring out the best way to plan maintenance, let me know!

[Zaim33]

That is a top answer and clear. Thanks for that.