Digital Workspace Platform : 6.2 Desktop Pools : 6.2.2 Instant Clones
   
6.2.2 Instant Clones
Instant Clone technology is a rapid clone mechanism available with Horizon 7 Enterprise Edition. One of the benefits of Instant Clones is that is doesn’t rely on the Composer Server, instead it uses vmFork, supported with vSphere Version 6.0 Update 1 or later. Despite some of the limitations listed in Table 3, it is significantly faster than View Composer Linked Clones.
 
Table 3. Linked vs Instant Clones
Feature
Linked Clones
Instant Clones
Windows 7
✓
✓
Windows 8
✓
 
Windows 10
✓
✓
Windows Server 2008 / 2012 / 2012 R2
✓
 
RDSH
✓
 
Floating Desktop Pools
✓
✓
Dedicated Desktop Pools
✓
 
App Volumes
✓
✓
Persistent or Disposable disks
✓
 
Linux
 
 
Multi-display
✓
✓**
vDGA/vGPU Support
✓
 
IPv6
✓
 
Multi-VLAN (network labels)
✓
 
Local host datastores
✓
 
VMware PowerCLI™ support
✓
 
Reboots required for cloning
2
0
* Applies to Horizon 7.0, current at the time of this document. Check release notes of future releases to determine whether this has changed.
** Instant Clones are limited to 2 monitors with a maximum resolution of 2560 X 1600