View Composer recompose questions

[DDunaway]

I attended this lab at VMworld in Vegas and although i know they have revised the product before its release, it seemed to be much cooler in Vegas, maybe it is just me.

ok, so I have my parent VM the way I want it. I am testing a recompose going from one snapshot to another snapshot of the same parent VM. (one with Office 2003 and one with 2007)

Once I kick off hte task, VCenter starts cloning another machine? is that correct? I cannot log back into my machine until that process is complete.

the 2 issues i have with this is,

1. I remember in Vegas that it was a quick as a log-off and log-on and "poof" you were back on your desktop using the new snapshot. almost no wait at all.

2. Once I do get logged back in to my desktop I immediately get prompted by Windows to reboot due to new hardware being installed. (I assume this is because of the user data D drive that has been attached)

I understnad that this product is different from the beta that I saw a few months ago, I just wonder if this is the same experience that everyone else is having?

[lamw]

DDunaway,

You actually answered one of my questions on how recomposed work, and this was my expectation that the Linked Clones would need to be redeployed. If you were to do this manually and you updated your Master VM say with a new base image, your existing Linked Clones would no longer work since they may be expecting certain things in your original base OS Image. Say you started with XP image and you made 5 Linked Clones, if you decided to update that Master image with Vista. You would need to basically create new Linked Clones and users would be affected until they were brought in. What they probably did at VMworld (speculating), they had 2 Pools (say Pool-A = XP, Pool-B = Vista). Since VMware View duplicates you initial Master VM to a "Replica", you're users would continue using it, then you would create a seperate Pool of Linked Clones which would be your Vista image and then once the pool is done, you would flip your users out take out the old VMs and decommission.

I have not played with recomposing and I'm not sure what all the technical details are, possibly create a new set of LC's and then decommission the old ones. Perhaps someone else on the forum may have more information but it makes since that it's creating a new "replica" and Linked Clones from that.

[DDunaway]

Thanks,

That's a good idea.

I will give it a shot recomposing to a Linked Clone from a different parent VM.

[lamw]

Well, I think you can recompose from the same Parent VM, but a new replica will be deployed and a new set of Linked Clones will be updated (I think). You would need to test this out to see if it's true. I'm not sure how it affects the user's pool, or are you expected to create another pool but using a different Master VM snapshot as your base and then create the replica's that way.

[Rodos]

Um ..

If you change the pool to use a new snapshot its going to create a new replica, and this will take a while. This is a once of process, and you can't log into the master whilst its happening. Thats what the master is for. Nothing to do with the users.

For the users, you need to decide when you are going to "recompose" them to the new machine version. The default for recomposition is immediate or you can choose to wait till the users log off which would be better (to stop a recomposition storm). The recompose should be quick and happen in the background whilst the user is logged off, so they should never know (apart from the changed machine when they log in).

Not sure a about the new hardware found, thats interesting? Is it something in your parent not quite right?

Rodos

Considering awarding points if this is of use

[TomHowarth]

Moved to the VMware View Manager forum

If you found this or any other answer useful please consider the use of the Helpful or correct buttons to award points

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

Blog: www.planetvm.net

[virtuallylost]

Is it possible to refresh/recompose an individual desktop within a pool?

[Chadd]

Yes, you can go into the pool, select inventory, and select the desktop(s) you would like to refresh/recompose. Select the 'View Composer" option up top and refresh or recompose.