Power state of Virtual machines used as templates for a View pool View 5.1

[nickxx4360]

Here is my situation guys. I have worked with View 4.6 and
5.0 before in the past.

I was told by a VMware technician, it is best practice to
have the VM being used as a template for a pool to be in a powered down state
all the time after you have associated that VM to a pool.

The only time you power this VM on is to make changes. Once
you are finished with the changes do an ipconfig release then power the machine
down.

You should then edit your pool settings to point to the new
changes.

Another question that comes up is in View 5.1, can I work on
this template in the middle of the day while users are working on the VM’s in
the pool associated with VM template machine without seeing a issue come up.

[mittim12]

I assume that we are talking about linked clones?     If so the typical best practice is make your changes on the template, ipconfig release, power down the machine, and then make the snapshot that you will point your pools to.     Once your pool is pointed to this snapshot a replica will be created and then clones will be created based on that replica. 

Once that is done you are free to power the "template" up an down to make changes as necessary without impacting the users.     This is possible because the clones are associated with the replica that was created.  

[nickxx4360]

Great! thanks. I thought so. I was told the "template" or "master image" VM should always be powered down even after the linked clones are created to prevent any problems from occuring.

[Rorus]

One thing that I've found is that if you have many applications that auto-update (including WSUS), it's handy to leave the template powered off so that when you are about to update the image, you know that nothing has changed since you took the last snapshot.

Probably not what the VMware Tech was referring to, but just my 2 cents.