angelage1's Posts

One other thing, since instant clones are stateless desktops, if you lose a production desktop because the datastore has gone down, Horizon will simply create another one in another available datastore. 

We don't have anything specific on the datastore design of instant clone.  Here's one that is higher level https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/techpaper/vmware-horizon-view-instant-clone-technology…

Horizon will automatically rebalance across the datastores so you wouldn't have to worry about that.  One thing I do want to point out is that you should minimize the number of datastores you deploy for your instant clones.  For every datastore, instant clone creates a replica VM (which is a full clone) which is used for internal management purposes, so if you have a 50GB image, and you are using 6 datastores, you will incur 300GB of space just for the replica VM.  Since you only have 400 desktops, why not just provision them in 1 or two datastores? 

Is this Horizon VDI?  If that's the case, I don't recommend having permanent linked clones.  That's not what linked clones are designed for.  Overtime, as more data is written to linked clones, we've gotten reports of slower performance from customers who've implemented this.  We think the reason is because of the data structure that linked clones maintain.  It sounds like what you really want is persistent VDI, which is typically served by full clones.  Why don't you just deploy full clones to start with?  -Angela Ge, Horizon Product Management

Since you are just starting to use Horizon, have you considered using Instant Clone instead of View Composer?  Instant Clone is a newer cloning technology that is faster, and does not require the installation of the View Composer database and server. VMware Instant Clone Technology for Just-In-Time Desktop Delivery in Horizon 7 Enterprise Edition | VMware End-User Comp…

VAAI is designed to offload full clone copies and large scale linked clone creation to storage arrays.  It has been very effective so far.  Instant Clones are by design very efficient when it comes to performance and therefore does not benefit from offloading to the storage arrays.  The only place where it would be beneficial is in the creation of those internal VMs (templates, replicas, and parentVMs), especially replicas since it's a full clone.  But there are so few replicas, therefore the impact of adding VAAI would be minimal from the customer experience perspective.  There are no plans to introduce it for instant clone replicas. -Angela,

This may be the issue https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2150925?sliceId=1&dialogID=534588837&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&stateId=1+0+453686866 Don't use ephemeral binding for instant clones, it may work initially but will cause problems down the road

Hi John, Thanks for bringing the Win 10 KB issue to my attention.  We do support 1703 CBB / SAC.  Recently there was a system migration of our Knowlege Base articles, for some reason, it looks like a very old version of the KB was migrated over and now shows up online.  We'll address the problem right away. In general, we are trying to add support to newer Win 10 versions as quickly as we can.  We are not able to commit to any specific timeline (i.e. x-day currency), but we are targeting a very short time frame.  Note for CB branches (or SAC during targeted phase) will only have tech preview support on Horizon 7.  Once it enters broad deployment phase, as declared by MSFT, we will be supporting it in production.

I'm the on the product management team for Horizon 7.  My engineering team is currently going through the qualification of Horizon 7.3.1 with 1709, they have not encountered this issue yet, but I wanted to make them aware.