Scheduled recompose didn't happen (View 5.2)

[WheatonCollege]

Hey all, we are running View 5.2 and we scheduled the recompose of a pool for 3 am last night and it looks like it set the new snapshot inside the pool settings but it did not recompose the desktops. I saw in the "Events" section of View Admin that it booted some people off a little after 3 am but I didn't see any mention of the recompose process. I also checked the tasks area of vCenter and didn't see any tasks getting fired off around that time. What I am doing now is deleting desktops that are available in the pool about 5 at a time so they come up with the new image but.... just curious why it didn't seem to complete. BTW, I saw the task scheduled inside the pool before hand and no longer see it so as far as View Admin thinks, it completed.

[nzorn]

Why not just recompose a few desktops at a time instead of deleting them?

Go into your Pool > Inventory Tab > Desktops (View Composer Details) > Select desktops > Right Click > Recompose

Also might check in there to see if there are any errors or any tasks pending.

[WheatonCollege]

Interesting... I didn't know you could do that. I always thought you had to recompose the entire pool to use a new snapshot. So, in the future when I need to make a change to a pool could I take a snapshot, go into the inventory like you suggested and recompose one desktop on that new snapshot (which should trigger the creation of the replica in vCenter) then just change the pool settings so the pool points to the new snapshot and then look in the inventory to see when desktops become available and recompose them manually a few at a time til I've done them all?

[nzorn · Accepted solution]

You could do it that way.

I always issue my recomposes with a wait for users to log off option.  This will recompose all machines that aren't logged into, but I also have the pool set to refresh on logoff.  And with the way View currently operates a refresh on logoff overrides a recompose task.  So I have to then recompose those leftover machines at a later time.  I also stopped recomposing in the middle of the night (unless I was monitoring it) in case there were any issues with vCenter or Composer.

[BWindmeyer]

Sorry if this is old, but I agree completely with you, nzorn.  My question, and I've been trying to find out for years, is why a refresh overrides the recompose?  And more importantly, is this considered a feature or a bug by VMware?  I can find nothing official about this, but it's a huge problem in some environments.

[nzorn]

I was able to escalate this problem, and have heard that this issue is fixed in the View 6.0 release, but I can't confirm that as I do not have access to 6.0.

[riki78]

Show KB: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2006707