Instant Clones

The Instant Clones feature is actually a functionality built into the vSphere platform rather than a specific Horizon feature, and was made available from the vSphere 6.0 U1 release, but is only now becoming a supported feature as part of Horizon 7.

It uses the VMware VM Fork technology to very quickly provision virtual desktop machines. An instant clone is created from an already powered on and running virtual desktop machine, called the Parent VM, which is quiesced before the Instant Clone is created. This is what makes Instant Clones quicker to provision than Linked Clones with View Composer.

The Instant Clone shares its memory and its disk with the parent VM for read operations, and is created immediately, and in an already powered-on state, unlike with View Composer-based Linked Clones that have to power-on as part of the creation process. As well as sharing the memory and disk with the parent VM, the Instant Clone has its own unique memory and delta disk file.

The following...