VM Support says there was no recovery other than to rebuild the pool from scratch \[...\] rebuilding a fifty workstation pool requires a lot of repetitive manual tasks
There are limited tools for getting VMs into pools with VDM 2.1. While it's possible to bring VMs in and out of manual pools, there's nothing official for adding VMs into persistent and non-persistent pools. We did publish a whitepaper some time ago with details for importing VMs through adding ldap entries (see the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Documentation), but that does require you to get pretty stuck in. This is something we plan to improve upon in future releases.
And combine this with the inability for clones to automatically join the domain
Ah, sysprep... it's a fickle beast. VC 2.5 will use the standard Microsoft sysprep process on your VMs, there are various posts in the VI forums about problems here but here are a couple of quick tips:
Make sure DHCP and DNS are functioning correctly in the subnet
Use the fully qualified domain name in the customization spec.
Make sure the template is not a member of a domain
And now I have 16 out of 19 users successfully logged in. 3 users are being directed to VDI workstations already in use - while I have twenty machines ready and unassigned in the pool.
This I'm very interested in, any chance you can give some more details of your environment. Are you able to turn trace logging on in the broker (warning: this will adversly affect performance of the machine) and one of the agents that more than one user is connecting to and give me a support bundle from each?