Keeping Linked-Clone Machines Provisioned for Use in Remote Desktop Sessions During View Composer Operations

If your users must be able to access remote desktops at all times, you must maintain a certain number of machines that are provisioned for use in remote desktop sessions even when View Composer maintenance operations take place. You can set a minimum number of machines that are not placed in maintenance mode while View Composer refreshes, recomposes, or rebalances the linked-clone virtual machines in a pool.

When you set a Minimum number of ready (provisioned) machines during View Composer maintenance operations, View ensures that the specified number of machines stay provisioned, and are not placed in maintenance mode, while View Composer proceeds through the maintenance operation.

This setting lets users maintain existing connections or make new connection requests during the View Composer maintenance operation. The setting does not distinguish between spare machines that are ready to accept new connections and machines that are already connected in existing desktop sessions.

You can specify this setting when you create or edit a linked-clone pool.

The following guidelines apply to this setting:

• To allow a number of users to maintain their existing desktop connections and keep a minimum number of spare (powered on) machines that can accept new connection requests, set the Minimum number of ready (provisioned) machines during View Composer maintenance operations to a large enough value to include both sets of machines.
• If you use a naming pattern to provision machines and provision machines on demand, set the number of provisioned machines during View Composer operations to a smaller value than the specified Max number of machines. If the maximum number were smaller, your pool could end up with fewer total machines than the minimum number you want to keep provisioned during View Composer operations. In this case, View Composer maintenance operations could not take place.
• If you provision machines by manually specifying a list of machine names, do not reduce the total pool size (by removing machine names) to a lower number than the minimum number of provisioned machines. In this case, View Composer maintenance operations could not take place.
• If you set a large minimum number of provisioned machines in relation to the pool size, View Composer maintenance operations might take longer to complete. While View maintains the minimum number of provisioned machines during a maintenance operation, the operation might not reach the concurrency limit that is specified in the Max concurrent View Composer maintenance operations setting.

  For example, if a pool contains 20 machines and the minimum number of provisioned machines is 15, View Composer can operate on at most five machines at a time. If the concurrency limit for View Composer maintenance operations is 12, the concurrency limit is never reached.

• In this setting name, the term "ready" applies to the state of the linked-clone virtual machine, not the machine status that is displayed in View Administrator. A virtual machine is ready when it is provisioned and ready to be powered on. The machine status reflects the View-managed condition of the machine. For example, a machine can have a status of Connected, Disconnected, Agent Unreachable, Deleting, and so on, and still be considered "ready".