Perform Maintenance on Instant-Clone Hosts

You can perform maintenance on hosts where instant clones reside by putting the ESXi hosts into maintenance mode. You use vSphere Client to put the ESXi host into maintenance mode.

In most cases, using instant clones does not change your operational flow of how you perform ESXi host maintenance tasks. Horizon 8 will automatically delete the instant clone parentVMs to allow the ESXi host to go into maintenance mode. When you use vSphere's Update Manager, an extra step is required.

If you use vSphere's Update Manager to update your ESXi hosts, you must delete or deactivate the instant clone parentVM before vSphere's Update Manager can successfully update the ESXi hosts.

Starting with Horizon 8 version 2006, you can globally deactivate all of the instant clone parentVMs in a vCenter Server so that vSphere's Update Manager can update the ESXi hosts in that vCenter Server. If you deactivate the parentVM setting for a vCenter Server, Horizon 8 will automatically delete all the parentVMs on every single host in that vCenter Server, so that the hosts can go into maintenance mode without any manual intervention. Deleting the parentVM does not impact the operations of instant clones as Horizon 8 can create instant clones with or without parentVMs.

To selectively deactivate parentVMs for certain clusters only rather than the entire vCenter Server, see Omnissa KB article 80369. If you leave the parentVM setting for the vCenter deactivated, any new instant clones are then provisioned without parentVMs. If you want Horizon 8 to use parentVMs when creating instant clones, then you can re-enable the parentVM setting for the vCenter Server after vSphere's Update Manager completes host maintenance. You must deactivate the parentVM for the vCenter Server before every update event.

Note: If you use vSphere's Update Manager, keep the instant clone parentVMs deactivated for your vCenter Server to simplify your ESXi maintenance.

Procedure

1. In Horizon Console, select Settings > Servers.

2. Select the server from the list, click More and select Disable ParentVMs.

3. Log in to vSphere Client.

4. Select the ESXi host that you want to put into maintenance and click Maintenance Mode > Enter Maintenance Mode.