Setting Up Desktop and Application Pools in View

What to do next
You can configure blackout days and times during which disk space reclamation and regeneration for View
Storage Accelerator do not take place. See “Set Blackout Times for ESXi Operations on View Virtual
Machines,” on page 216.
In View Administrator, you can select Catalog > Desktop Pools and select a machine to display the last time
space reclamation occurred and the last amount of space reclaimed on the machine.
Using View Composer Array Integration with Native NFS Snapshot
Technology (VAAI)
If your deployment includes NAS devices that support the vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), you
can enable the View Composer Array Integration (VCAI) feature on linked-clone pools. This feature uses
native NFS snapshot technology to clone virtual machines.
With this technology, the NFS disk array clones the virtual machine files without having the ESXi host read
and write the data. This operation might reduce the time and network load when virtual machines are
cloned.
Apply these guidelines for using native NFS snapshot technology:
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You can use this feature only if you configure desktop pools on datastores that reside on NAS devices
that support native cloning operations through VAAI.
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You can use View Composer features to manage linked clones that are created by native NFS snapshot
technology. For example, you can refresh, recompose, rebalance, create persistent disks, and run
QuickPrep customization scripts on these clones.
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You cannot use this feature if you store replicas and OS disks on separate datastores.
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This feature is supported on vSphere 5.0 and later.
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If you edit a pool and select or deselect the native NFS cloning feature, existing virtual machines are not
affected.
To change existing virtual machines from native NFS clones to traditional redo log clones, you must
deselect the native NFS cloning feature and recompose the pool to a new base image. To change the
cloning method for all virtual machines in a pool and use a different datastore, you must select the new
datastore, deselect the native NFS cloning feature, rebalance the pool to the new datastore, and
recompose the pool to a new base image.
Similarly, to change virtual machines from traditional redo log clones to native NFS clones, you must
select a NAS datastore that supports VAAI, select the native NFS cloning feature, rebalance the pool to
the NAS datastore, and recompose the pool.
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On an ESXi cluster, to configure native cloning on a selected NFS datastore in View Administrator, you
might have to install vendor-specific NAS plug-ins that support native cloning operations on VAAI on
all ESXi hosts in the cluster. See your storage vendor documentation for guidance on configuration
requirements.
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Native NFS snapshot technology (VAAI) is not supported on virtual machines with space-efficient
disks. VAAI is not supported on machines that are virtual hardware version 9 or later, because these OS
disks are always space-efficient, even when you disable the space reclamation operation.
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This feature is not available if you use a Virtual SAN datastore or a Virtual Volumes datastore.
Chapter 15 Reducing and Managing Storage Requirements
VMware, Inc. 215