In our environment it’s on the same server as vCenter. Logon to your server hosting VMware View Composer. Here are the steps for un-protecting a linked-clone replica:ġ. Our VMware View environment is version 5.3. VMware recommends using this tool if you want to get rid of “Orphaned” replicas, I didn’t use it for this purpose but the method applies for that case. It’s best to keep replicas protected to avoid issues. So I up-protected the replica using “Sviconfig.exe” provided with VMware View Composer installation, vMotioned it to it’s original host, then protected it using the same tool. They cannot be vMotioned using vCenter credentials. Later on I found out that this was due to VMware View replicas being protected. However, when I tried to do so, I’ve realised the migrate option on the replica was greyed out. But nevertheless, I wanted to migrate replica back to its original host. It only cares about the datastore the replica and the linked clones are stored on ( so it’s best to turn off SDRS for VDI clusters*). Luckily this didn’t create a major issue as VMware View doesn’t care about which host the replica resides on. I forgot to un-tick the prompt tick box about “Powered off VMs” which comes up after you initiate maintenance mode for the host. Unfortunately I also migrated the VMware View Linked-Clone replica residing on that host. I’ve put the first host in the cluster into the maintenance mode and migrated all the Virtual Desktops to the other host in the cluster. The other day I was patching the hosts in a cluster which currently hosts our Virtual Desktop environment.

Vmware esxi vdi