The Datastores tab is used to set up datastores for your system to use.

Note: For Instant Clone images, if you do not set up any datastores for desktop storage, the system looks for datastores that are accessible, not read-only, and have multi-host access (non-local).
  • If no such datastores are found, assignment creation fails.
  • If such a datastore is found and used, VMs might not be placed on the same datastore as the template VM, which can also cause performance issues for users.
Important: For Instant Clone desktops, mixing datastore types (vSAN and VMFS) is not supported. If both types of datastores are available to the desktop cluster, then you must explicitly set the regex (DATASTORE_REGEX) for Desktops to ensure that only one datastore type is used for desktops.

To set up datastores:

  1. Click the appropriate text box (Desktop Primary Storage, Desktop Auxiliary Storage).
  2. Enter a regular expression for the names of the datastores.
Note the following:
  • In order for a datastore to be added, that datastore must be present, using a consistent name, on all compute resources assigned to a given desktop manager.

  • If you set up multiple datastores for desktop storage, clones are put on the datastore that contains the image if it is 75% full or less. If that datastore is more than 75% full, then the clones are put on the datastore that has more space available.

  • The 75% threshold above is a default setting that can be changed using the datastore.max.usage.percent policy.