Renaming Persistent Disk

[keviom]

I needed to move some users from one pool to another to add some scanner drivers to their VMs. These are all dedicated linked clone VMs. I have successfully detached, moved to new pool and recreated a test VM in the new pool as per the following helpful article:- View 5.2 – Moving Persistent Disks To Another Pool | VMFocus The only issue I have now is that the persistent disk file name still matches the old VM machine name from the old pool, and not the new VM name in the new pool, i.e. New VM name = POOL_B_VM1 and Persistent disk name = POOL_A_VM6.

Is there an easy way to rename the persistent disk so that it matches the new VM name?

Thanks in advance

[cyberfed2727]

Easy? No. We found ourselves in the same boat of moving VDI's with Pdisks to a new pool. We actually used the same guide you referenced to make the move. After some testing we found a way to get the Pdisks to match the new pool machine #'s. The process is cumbersome and manual. It also requires downtime for your VDI's.

For the sake of discussion I'll lay out a scenario so you can follow along.

Pool A

Machine name: VDIVM01 with a persistent disk VDIVM01_D_Drive

Pool B:

Create a pool with only 1 VM to be provisioned. Make sure you DISABLE provisioning during the pool creation. This will create essentially an empty pool. This new pool should point to your prepared golden image identical to Pool A's golden image.

Disable pool A

Detach the Pdisk - this will delete the VM off of pool A leaving only the VDIVM01_D_Drive persistent disk wherever you decide to store it.

Edit the detached disk and change its association from Pool A to Pool B.

Select Re-create desktop. This will build a desktop VDIVM01 with the VDIVM01_D_Drive attached to it on Pool B now.

Since you have provisioning disabled on Pool B you'll see an "unknown" desktop awaiting deployment.

Enable Pool B - this will then trigger VDIVM01 to be deployed. Once complete you will have matching computer names / Pdisks.

**NOTE**

This has to be done one VDI at a time. Meaning after VDIVM01 is complete you have then disable provisioning on Pool B again and increase the # of desktops from 1 to 2 and repeat the detach/recreate desktop process. This is the only way we have found to keep the computer name VDIVM## to line up with the Pdisk name##.

We tried setting Pool B to say 5 desktops (disabled provisioning) and then tried moving 5 detached Pdisks at once to pool B, it'll attach the disks fine with no data loss however Horizon View randomly assigns the Pdisks to the newly minted desktops, we ended up with machines such as:

VMVDI01 with VMVDI04_D_Drive

VMVDI02 with VMVDI01_D_Drive

VMVDI03 with VMVDI05_D_Drive  

ect.... basically the naming convention within View is all wrong but from an end user perspective they have all their data with the only difference being a different computer name.

While we were able to get things to line up by doing this process one by one it wasn't realistic since we have several hundred VDI's.

Possible but not practical. If someone has a better way please share.

[EricNichols]

I thought there would be a way to accomplish this with powershell or vdmadmin but there isn't.

It is interesting to see such disparity between the capabilities of the web admin vs powershell vs vdmadmin.

Documentation for VMware Horizon 6 version 6.2

[homerjnick]

Yeah my persistent disks names are all out of whack too but does it really matter?  It's just a display name...you can export out to CSV the list and have as reference.