Also see VMware Technical White Paper VMware Horizon 7 Instant-Clone Desktops and RDSH Servers.

See Instant-Clone Desktop Pools at VMware Docs.

An alternative is Microsoft FSLogix, or VMware App Volumes Writable Volumes.

Persistent disks are not supported with Instant Clones.

See the Smart Provisioning YouTube video for an overview.

For lower density, Horizon 2006 and newer support Smart Provisioning, which eliminates the need for “Parent” machines.

Composer does not need parent virtual machines. If you have six hosts and three datastores containing instant clones, then Horizon creates 18 parent virtual machines. These “parent” machines are powered on and consume CPU/Memory/Disk resources.

If you deploy 12+ VMs per host of the same pool, then “Parent” machines are created on each ESXi host for each datastore.

The master VM snapshot is copied to every LUN containing instant clones.

Composer was removed from Horizon 2012 (8.1) and newer.

2020 Aug 14 – updated entire article for Horizon 2006 (8.0)Īll editions of Horizon 2006 and newer include Instant Clones so there is no need to use Composer.

2021 Jan 9 – updated screenshots for Horizon 2012 (8.1).

2021 Jan 10 – Instant Clones ESXi Maintenance – new Disable ParentVMs feature for VUM.

2021 Mar 28 – new section for Automated Persistent Full Clones.

2023 Jan 13 – Automated Full Clone Pool – Horizon 2212 lets you specify the OU.

This post applies to all VMware Horizon versions 2006 (8.0) and newer.

RDS Farms and pools are detailed in a separate article at. This article details Horizon pool configuration for Virtual Desktops.

Vmware horizon 8 2106