View Composer Persistent Disks

With View Composer, you can configure OS data and user information on separate disks in linked-clone desktops. View Composer preserves the user information on the persistent disk when the OS data is updated, refreshed, or rebalanced.

A View Composer persistent disk contains user settings and other user-generated data.

You can detach a persistent disk from its linked-clone desktop and store the disk on its original datastore or another datastore. After you detach the disk, the linked-clone virtual machine is deleted. A detached persistent disk is no longer associated with any desktop.

You can use several methods to attach an detached persistent disk to another linked-clone desktop. This flexibility has several uses:

■	When a linked clone is deleted, you can preserve the user data.

■	When an employee leaves the company, another employee can access the departing employee's user data.

■	A user who has multiple desktops can consolidate the user data on a single desktop.

■	If a virtual machine becomes inaccessible in vCenter Server, but the persistent disk is intact, you can import the persistent disk and create a new linked clone using the disk.

Note

You cannot detach a persistent disk from a Windows XP linked clone and recreate or attach the persistent disk to a Windows 7 or Windows Vista linked clone. Persistent disks must be reconnected to the operating system that was used when they were created.

View Manager can manage persistent disks from linked-clone pools that were created in View Manager 4.5. Persistent disks that were created in earlier versions of View Manager cannot be managed and do not appear on the Persistent Disks page in View Administrator.