VMware Horizon Community
awhmichael
Contributor
Contributor

Take snapshot of linked clones

Has anyone tried taking snapshots of linked clones? I have a training center that i need to deploy VMs to. The training user accounts need to maintain profiles (outlook, in-house software settings, etc). It's a pain, but this needs to be done in order to avoid setting up profiles each time the users reboot. However, I also don't want to retain certain aspects of their profiles (i.e., desktop icons, IE changes, display settings, etc). So far, the only logical idea that i've come to, and tested successfully, is to take snapshots of those VMs. After each class, I just revert the VMs back to the snapshot. BTW: I am using UDD.

Is this wise to do? I'm not sure what effect it will have if I do this for a period of time.

Thank you,

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7 Replies
admin
Immortal
Immortal

I believe you can use the Environment Manager from appsense.com to give users a "partial" profile (they call it personalization) which is what you would need to keep Outlook settings but not IE or other changes.

Have you tried non-persistent desktops? the user would get the pre-configured environment at each boot. However, you would need to pre-load the Outlook and application settings somehow.

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awhmichael
Contributor
Contributor

Yeah, we looked into appsense, but it's too expensive.

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mittim12
Immortal
Immortal

I have never tried to snapshot a clone although I did attempt to clone a linked clone due to losing the master and I couldn't make it work. Have you tried using the user data disk to accomplish this?






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rosspcs
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Why dont you create a backup copy of the profiles and then have a script to copy them in, you could use runonce, or quickprep

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awhmichael
Contributor
Contributor

I do use UDDs. The problem is that it captures things like desktop icons, stuff in my documents, and other personalizations that I don't want to keep. However, outlook and our in-house software settings (profile based) need to remain so we don't have to reconfigure everytime we refresh/recompose.

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awhmichael
Contributor
Contributor

Taking a snapshot of the linked clone and reverting after the class concludes works beautifully. My only concern is what kind of an impact it may have on the linked clones (i.e., when running refresh, recompose, etc.), or on performance.

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mittim12
Immortal
Immortal

The only way to be sure is to test it but my concerns is during a refresh or something similar may change the parent (linked clone) thus making the snapshot invalid. I think you need to test every scenerio and see if it works.






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