Virtual desktop templates and parent VMs

Horizon View uses virtual machine templates to create the desktops in pools for full virtual machines and uses parent VMs to create the desktops in a linked clone desktop pool. These virtual machine templates and the parent VMs are another important part of the View infrastructure that needs protection. These backups are a crucial part of being able to quickly restore the desktop pools and the RDS hosts in the event of data loss.

While frequent changes occur for standard virtual machines, the virtual machine templates and parent VMs only need backing up after new changes have been made to the template and parent VM images. These backups should be readily available for rapid redeployment when required.

For environments that use full cloning as the provisioning technique for the vDesktops, the gold template should be backed up regularly. The gold template is the master vDesktop that all other vDesktops are cloned from. The VMware KB article, Backing up...