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Table Of Contents
Storage Sizing for Instant-Clone and View Composer Linked-Clone
Desktop Pools
View provides high-level guidelines that can help you determine how much storage an instant-clone or
linked-clone desktop pool requires. A table in the Add Desktop Pool wizard shows a general estimate of the
desktop pool's storage requirements.
The storage-sizing table also displays the free space on the datastores that you select for storing OS disks,
View Composer persistent disks (for View Composer linked clones only), and replicas. You can decide
which datastores to use by comparing the actual free space with the estimated requirements for the desktop
pool.
The formulas that View uses can only provide a general estimate of storage use. The clones' actual storage
growth depends on many factors:
n
Amount of memory assigned to the parent virtual machine
n
Frequency of refresh operations (for View Composer linked clones only)
n
Size of the guest operating system's paging file
n
Whether you redirect paging and temp files to a separate disk (for View Composer linked clones only)
n
Whether you configure separate View Composer persistent disks (for View Composer linked clones
only)
n
Workload on the desktop machines, 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 clones, configure your desktop pool so that
particular sets of datastores are dedicated to particular ESXi clusters. Do not configure pools randomly
across all the datastores so that most or all ESXi hosts must access most or all LUNs.
When too many ESXi hosts attempt to write to the 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 View Architecture Planning document.
Sizing Guidelines for Instant-Clone and Linked-Clone Pools
When you create or edit an instant-clone or linked-clone desktop pool, the Select Linked (or Instant) Clone
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. The guidelines calculate space needed for new linked
clones.
Sizing Table for OS Disks and Persistent Disks
Table 16-1 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.
NOTE The persistent disk information is for View Composer linked clones only. Instant clones do not
support persistent disks.
Chapter 16 Reducing and Managing Storage Requirements
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