Using VMware View for Server Linked Clone Desktops
October 03, 2011 
Sean Crookston 
While playing in my home lab I recently had the idea pop in my mind of if View would support linked cloning of server operating systems. And by support I mean allow as there is no way any of the following is supported by VMware.
There are a number of reason I can think of that would be a good use case. Firstly if there was a need to have a pool of test servers available for quick installation or functionality testing. Secondly for saving some space in lab setups where disk space is of particular concern. The limited space of SSDs become much less of a concern if so.
You may say well lab manager and vCloud Director exist for this. And I would agree with you there. My main concern is simplicity and being I already have View setup and running this would be a very simple solution. Now there does already exist several PowerShell scripts that will create linked clone desktops for you. They work very well but for me my lab becomes so disorganized that the idea of managing my clones through a GUI interface like VMware View is very appealing. Besides its cool.
While I did get View to somewhat work it wasn’t perfect. I still am unable to connect with the View client, which is not something I truly desire but would have been cool. For automatically assigning desktops to individuals this would have been necessary, but logging in via RDP or the vSphere client is more then enough for me. The agent to my surprise installed without issue so I was hopeful it would work but unfortunately it did not.I also found that the only way to get systems to automatically be named was through the use of a customization specification.
Below is what you’ll need to do. Note that I only tested this with vSphere 5 and View 5 and don’t know if it will work any more or less then it does with other configurations. If you’ve tried this before or gotten any further then I have I’d be eager to hear from you.
- A requirement for View to even detect the system and snapshot when creating the pool is that it be a desktop operating system. So I also had to change my 2k3 machine to a windows xp hardware profile and my w2k8 server to a Windows 7 hardware profile.
- As mentioned above the only way to get systems to be named according to any type of naming pattern was to use a customization spec.
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