VMware Horizon – Delete a desktop pool

Release date: April 8th 2019

Welcome to my VMware Horizon series. In this session I will describe how to delete a desktop pool and clean up afterwards.

From time to time I have to delete desktop and/or application-pools. This to keep a nice and tidy setup. In this session I’m going to delete the desktop pool named “Win10-1709-No”.  First I log into Horizon Administrator, select Desktop Pools from Catalog in the menu

I find my desktop pool in the list, double-click it to view details

The pool has two virtual machines

From the Inventory-tab, I can verify the details about this pool’s two virtual machines. There are no users logged in, so deleting should affect nobody.

When  I log into my vCenter, I can verify the two virtual machines existence and status

I can also see the two vm’s in the datastore

If I open “ADUC”, I see the computer-accounts from my vm’s

In order to delete the desktop-pool, I first disable provisioning

Next I disable the desktop pool

Finally I select Delete

The status of the pool changes to (Deleting)

vCenter cleans up in vSphere after pool is deleted

We now see that the vm’s and folder are also deleted

The vm’s are deleted from the datastore as well.

When I check back in «ADUC», I can verify that the computer-accounts are still there, I manually delete the computer accounts and OU. I also delete the GPO I configured for this pool.

That completes the not so funny but quite important job of cleaning up, that has to be done from time to time.

VMware Horizon View planning, deployment etc.

Disclaimer: Every tips/tricks/posting I have published here, is tried and tested in different it-solutions. It is not guaranteed to work everywhere, but is meant as a tip for other users out there. Remember, Google is your friend and don’t be afraid to steal with pride! Feel free to comment below as needed.