> 5. This is a strange one - I didn't decrease the pool size in the steps above (our servers have enough overhead to take the full pool size with one server down). I'm assuming that when desktops on the other datastores are deleted (logged off) > one by one, they will be spun up on this restored datastore (one by one)?

Sorry... My bad. You don't need to increase pool size. Instead user "Disable Provisioning" before VM removal and "Enable Provisioning" after patching, and adding the host-back..

(If so, even you don't need to edit the datastore spec.)