Rebalancing operations with View Composer

The rebalance operation in View Composer is used to evenly distribute the linked clone virtual desktop machines across multiple datastores in your environment. You would perform this task if one of your datastores was becoming full while others have ample free space. It might also help with the performance of that datastore. For example, if you had 10 virtual desktop machines in one datastore and only 2 in another, then running a rebalance operation would potentially even this out and leave you with 6 virtual desktop machines in each datastore.

You must use the View Administrator console to initiate the rebalance operation in View Composer. If you simply try to Storage vMotion any of your virtual desktop machines, then View Composer will not be able to keep track of them.

On the other hand, if you have six virtual desktop machines on one datastore and seven on another, then it is highly likely that initiating a rebalance operation will have no effect, and no virtual desktop machines will be moved, as doing so has no benefit. A VDI desktop will only be moved to another datastore if the target datastore has significantly more spare capacity than the source:

  1. The linked clone is switched to maintenance mode.
  2. Virtual machines to be moved are identified based on the free space in the available datastores.
  3. The operating system disk and persistent disk are disconnected from the virtual desktop machine.
  4. The detached operating system disk and persistent disk are moved to the target datastore.
  5. The virtual desktop machine is moved to the target datastore.
  6. The operating system disk and persistent disk are reconnected to the linked clone virtual desktop machine.
  7. View Composer resynchronizes the linked clone virtual desktop machines.
  1. View Composer checks for the replica disk in the datastore and creates one if one does not already exist, as per the provisioning steps covered earlier in this chapter.
  2. As per a recompose operation, the OS disk for the linked clone gets deleted and a new one is created and then customized.

The following diagram shows the rebalance operation. It started with two virtual desktop machines in datastore A, and four virtual desktop machines in datastore B. The rebalance operation in this example evened out the datastores so that there are four virtual desktop machines in each of the two datastores:

In the next section, we are going to look at the Instant Clone feature for creating virtual desktop machines.

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