For the latest episode of my video series, I brought Tom Campbell back on. Tom wanted to talk about Instant Clones, why they are important, and how they differ from other virtual desktop provisioning models. This feature has been around for several years now, but I am often amazed that it is not the default for more customers.

Simply put, the Instant Clones feature of Horizon is based on the VM Fork technology first introduced in vSphere 6. It allows the live copying (forking) of a running virtual machine. This includes the disk, the memory, and even down to the running processes within the VM. This allows for running virtual machines to be deployed extremely quickly during peak login periods, thus reducing the number of “waiting” machines when compared to Linked Clones and other disk cloning technologies.

For more information, check out both the vSphere documentation (this is actually a feature of vSphere) and the Horizon documentation on steps to configure this within your pools.

In the Ron’s Cool Feature video series, I talk with VMware Product Managers, Engineers, and Field Engineers to dig into and find cool and sometimes overlooked features within our product stacks. Some of these will be new and exciting with lots of fanfare, and others may just be a cool feature that I think has been overlooked but has the ability to really impact the average admin that is dealing with our technology on a daily basis.