5.2

The formulas that View Manager uses can only provide a general estimate of storage use. Your linked clones'
actual storage growth depends on many factors:
n
Amount of memory assigned to the parent virtual machine
n
Frequency of refresh operations
n
Size of the guest operating system's paging file
n
Whether you redirect paging and temp files to a separate disk
n
Whether you configure separate View Composer persistent disks
n
Workload
on the linked-clone desktops, determined primarily by the types of applications that users run
in the guest operating system
NOTE In a deployment that includes hundreds or thousands of linked clones, configure your linked-clone
pools so that particular sets of datastores are dedicated to particular ESX clusters. Do not configure pools
randomly across all the datastores so that most or all ESX hosts must access most or all LUNs.
When too many ESX hosts attempt to write to linked-clone OS disks on a particular LUN, contention problems
can occur, degrading performance and interfering with scalability. For more information about datastore
planning in large deployments, see the VMware Horizon View Architecture Planning document.
Sizing Guidelines for Linked-Clone Pools
When
you create or edit a linked-clone desktop pool, the Select Datastores page displays a table that provides
storage-sizing guidelines. The table can help you to decide which datastores to select for the linked-clone disks.
Sizing Table for Linked-Clone Disks
Table 5-7 shows an example of storage-sizing recommendations that might be displayed for a pool of 10 virtual
machines if the parent virtual machine has 1GB of memory and a 10GB replica. In this example, different
datastores are selected for OS disks and View Composer persistent disks.
Table 5-7. Example Sizing Table for Linked-Clone Disks
Data Type
Selected Free Space
(GB)
Min Recommended
(GB) 50% Utilization (GB)
Max Recommended
(GB)
OS disks 184.23 40.00 80.00 130.00
Persistent disks 28.56 4.00 10.00 20.00
The Selected Free Space column shows the total available space on all of the datastores that you selected for
a disk type such as OS disks.
The Min Recommended column shows the minimum amount of recommended storage for a pool.
The 50%
Utilization column shows the recommended storage when the linked-clone disks grow to 50% of the
parent virtual machine.
The Max Recommended column shows the recommended storage when the linked-clone disks approach the
full size of the parent virtual machine.
If you store OS disks and persistent disks on the same datastore, View Manager calculates the storage
requirements of both disk types. The Data Type is shown as Linked clones instead of a particular disk type.
If you store View Composer replicas on a separate datastore, the table also shows storage recommendations
for the replicas and adjusts the recommendations for OS disks.
Sizing Guidelines
The table provides general guidelines. Your storage calculations must account for additional factors that can
affect actual storage growth in the linked-clone pool.
Chapter 5 Creating Desktop Pools
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