Linked Clones provide administrators with the ability to clone a pool of desktops from a master image. In order to enable this functionality, a View Composer server is deployed, which consists of a web service (SIM), the Universal File Access (UFA) service and other components, including the vCenter Server API. View Composer receives instructions from Horizon as XML messages, and initiates the linked clone creation using vCenter Server API calls and the SIM service (Scalable Image Management). It is essentially a workflow engine.

When a Linked Clone desktop pool is created, Composer will run a number of parallel clone creation tasks, defined by the maximum setting in “Max concurrent View Composer provisioning operations” (default is 8).