You can attach a persistent disk to a Windows instant clone virtual machine. Attaching a persistent disk makes the user settings and information in the disk available to the user of the other virtual machine.

You can select a detached persistent disk and attach it to an instant clone VM from a pool that has persistent disk enabled and a user is assigned to the VM to which a persistent disk will be attached. An attached persistent disk will become available as a secondary disk on the selected instant-clone virtual machine. You can attach more than one secondary disk to an instant clone desktop.

Prerequisites

  • Before you attach a persistent disk to another VM, make sure you have a pool with persistent disk created and users are assigned to the VMs of this pool.
  • You cannot attach a persistent disk that is stored on a non-vSAN datastore to a virtual machine that is stored on a vSAN datastore. Similarly, you cannot attach a disk that is stored on vSAN to a virtual machine that is stored on non-vSAN. Horizon Console prevents you from selecting virtual machines that span vSAN and non-vSAN datastores.
  • Persistent disks are not available for Linux based virtual machines as this feature uses Windows specific APIs.
  • Persistent disks must be reconnected to the operating system that was used when they were created. For example, you cannot detach a persistent disk from a Windows 7 instant clone and recreate or attach the persistent disk to a Windows 8 instant clone.

Procedure

  1. In Horizon Console, select Inventory > Persistent Disks.
  2. On the Detached tab, select the persistent disk and click Attach.
  3. In the pop-up window displaying the list of machines, select the machine with its corresponding user and desktop pool, and click Attach.
    Note: Filtering and sorting for the attachable-machines grid is not currently supported.

What to do next

Verify that the user of the instant clone has sufficient privileges to use the attached disk. For example, if the original user had certain access permissions on the persistent disk, and the persistent disk is attached as drive D on the new linked clone, the new user of the instant clone must have the original user's access permissions on drive D.

Log in to the instant clone's guest operating system as an administrator and assign appropriate privileges to the new user.