Horizon 7.1: Instant Clone, Deploy and Configure Part 1 of 2

/ June 20, 2017/ VMware Horizon

In this blog I will describe how you can configure and deploy an instant clone desktop. The Blog has two parts, part 1 is how instant clone works and part 2 is configuring the desktop and creating the pool.

There are several ways to deploy a virtual desktop with VMware Horizon. At this moment the most using technology is a desktop with linked clones.

Instant clone technology is all about deploying and delivering a desktop “just in time”, administrators can deploy a new image within an couple of minutes.
The main difference is that instant clone shares the memory of the parent vm ( Copy-on-write )any reads comes from the parent VM and write actions are saved in a delta disk.

In contrast to Linked Clones, an external database isn’t needed. The instant clone engine is a Java App that runs on the tomcat server. With Horizon 7.0 or later when there are multiple connection servers the Java App engine is protected in case of a server failure.

#Difference of process between Composer Clones and Instant Clones#

Linked clones

Clone -> Reconfig -> Power-on -> Customize -> Creating checkpoint -> Power-on -> User Login

Instant Clone with vmFork Technology

Clone with vmFork -> Power-on -> Customize -> User Login

Process of deploying a desktop;

1- Select the Master VM and snapshot in the Horizon manager ( Desktop With instant clone module installed )
2- vCenter creates a template VM
3- vCenter creates a Replica VM
4- vCenter creates a Parent VM
5- vCenter powered on the parent VM
6- vCenter clones the parent VM

Template VM
– A clone of the master VM, This VM is used for the Active directory domain join

Replica VM
– A thin provisioned full clone of the template VM.

Parent VM
– This is a running VM based on a clone of the replica VM

 

 

Publishing the master image in my test environment ( process 1 to 5 ) takes around 10,5 minutes, deploying the desktop ( process 6 ) with an available status in Horizon takes around 12 seconds.
With the linked clone technology it takes a lot more than 12 seconds each desktop.

With Horizon 7.1, you can use Nvidia Grid vGPUs in combination with instant clone and PCoIP ( Tech preview ), and there is more Link