I tried doing some searching and could not find a discussion with the details I was looking for. If this has been brought up previously, I apologize.
I work for an institution where I'm in charge of their VMware View infrastructure and deployment. We've been using View for about 2 years now and have about 250 stations using our View environment, with more on the horizon (no pun intended?). Over these last couple years, I've realized that I'll need multiple pools to support our environment. Since different areas have different software requirements, we either need to install ALL of our software (that cannot be put into a ThinApp package, which unfortunately is a sizable number) into a single image, or create multiple images with software specialization (such as an Engineering image with AutoCAD, and a Trades image with software related to trades, etc.). In addition, we're in the process of expanding our environment for an administrative rollout, which will require a complete different set of software.
I know I'm not alone with this type of configuration and I'm curious how you handle these types of situations. Do you have multiple master images that you use, or maybe you use a single master image with a series of snapshots? Or, perhaps you've come up with a new and creative way to address this scenario.
Currently, I have a single master image that has a tiered set of snapshots, which looks something like this:
Base Snapshot (Windows installed, updated with BIOS and VM settings configured and no additional software installed)
- Engineering Snapshot (no changes in this snapshot, I just use it to create a visual separation in the snapshot manager)
- Configured Snapshot (This has all of the engineering software installed and configured. This is where I would return if I needed to do windows updates
- Ready for View (This is the snapshot that I use to create the pool with in VMware View)
- Trades snapshot
- Configured Snapshot
- Ready for View
This should give you an idea of how it's laid out. Although this has worked so far, I'm not certain if it's the best approach. It does help with space savings, instead of creating multiple VMs for each configuration. I'm not sure how this will continue to work as our environment grows, so I figured I would be proactive and explore other means of handling multiple gold or master images without taking up crazy amounts of space.