Re: [Users] from irc

Hi, I had a question on IRC regarding sysprep/sealing of Windows VMs and use in Pools. Basically, if you follow the Quick Start Guide, it says to seal the VM and shut it down before making the Template. My problem with this is that when you start a VM from the Pool, it takes forever to unseal - i.e. to repersonalize itself. That's a bad experience from a VDI perspective - you want the user to get a desktop they can start using ASAP. Itamar responded to me directly via e-mail: This raises some questions. I'd love to understand this better. He's asked me to cross this conversation onto the Users list now. 1. My understanding is that a Pool clones VMs on demand from a template. So how does the admin "launch" the template? I thought the only way to exercise a pool is from the User Portal. Is it sufficient to do that as Admin? I thought the persistence only came when launching a VM from the Admin Portal. 2. My understanding of "sealing" a system is that this depersonalizes it - e.g. removes hostname, prepares network for reinitialization, etc. And that the next time the system boots up it re-personalizes. So if one were to restart it, even as admin, this would reverse the sealing process, which would seem to make sealing in the first place pointless. What am I missing? At the moment I don't see the point of sealing a VM before putting it into the Pool (assuming you're using DHCP, anyway). What happens if you don't? Thanks, Bob P.S. I note the behavior of Fedora vs RHEL 6 is quite different in this regard. If you follow the "sealing" process on the Quick Start page for Fedora it seems to have no visible effect, but on RHEL 6 it puts you through a re-personalization dialog which is rather extensive (and again, not really suitable for VDI use).