Linked clone disk

The main disk that is created is the linked clone disk itself. This linked clone disk is basically an empty virtual disk container that is attached to the virtual desktop machine as the user logs in and the desktop starts up and boots.

This disk will start off small but will grow over time depending on the block changes that are requested from the replica disk by the virtual desktop machine's operating system. These block changes are stored in the linked clone disk, and this disk is sometimes referred to as the delta disk, or differential disk, since it stores all the delta changes that the desktop operating system requests from the parent VM. As mentioned before, the linked clone disk can grow to the maximum size, equal to the parent VM, but, following best practice, you would never let this happen. Typically, you can expect the linked clone disk to only increase to a few hundred MBs. We will cover this in the Linked clone features and functionality section later in this chapter.

The replica disk is set as read-only and is used as the primary disk. Any writes and/or block changes that are requested by the virtual desktop are written/read directly from the linked clone disk.

Recommended best practice is to allocate tier-1 storage, such as local or shared SSD drives, for storing and hosting the replica, as all virtual desktop machines within the cluster will be continually referencing this single read-only VMDK file as their base image. Keeping it high in the stack improves performance, by reducing the overall storage