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The following guidelines apply to this setting:
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If you use a naming pattern to provision machines and provision machines on demand, set the number
of ready machines during View Composer operations to a smaller value than the specified Min number
of machines. If the minimum number were smaller, your pool could end up with fewer total machines
than the minimum number you want to keep provisioned and ready during View Composer
operations. In this case, View Composer maintenance operations could not take place.
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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 ready machines. In
this case, View Composer maintenance operations could not take place.
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If you set a large minimum number of ready machines in relation to the pool size, View Composer
maintenance operations might take longer to complete. While View maintains the minimum number of
ready 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 ready 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.
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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.
Use Existing Active Directory Computer Accounts for Linked Clones
When you create or edit a desktop pool, you can configure View Composer to use existing computer
accounts in Active Directory for newly provisioned linked clones.
By default, View Composer generates a new Active Directory computer account for each linked clone that it
provisions. The Allow reuse of pre-existing computer accounts option lets you control the computer
accounts that are created in Active Directory by ensuring that View Composer uses existing AD computer
accounts.
With this option enabled, when a linked clone is provisioned, View Composer checks if an existing AD
computer account name matches the linked clone machine name. If a match exists, View Composer uses the
existing AD computer account. If View Composer does not find a matching AD computer account name,
View Composer generates a new AD computer account for the linked clone.
You can set the Allow reuse of pre-existing computer accounts option when you create a new desktop pool
or edit an existing pool. If you edit a pool and set this option, the setting affects linked-clone machines that
are provisioned in the future. Linked clones that are already provisioned are not affected.
When you set the Allow reuse of pre-existing computer accounts option, you can limit the Active Directory
permissions assigned to the View Composer user account that generates the desktop pool. Only the
following Active Directory permissions are required:
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List Contents
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Read All Properties
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Read Permissions
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Reset Password
You can only limit the Active Directory permissions if you are sure that all machines you intend to
provision have existing computer accounts allocated in Active Directory. View Composer generates a new
AD computer account if no matching name is found. Additional permissions such as Create Computer
Objects are required to create new computer accounts. For a complete list of permissions required for the
View Composer user account, see the VMware Horizon View Administration document.
Chapter 5 Creating Linked-Clone Desktop Pools
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