Horizon Composer is used to provision linked clone virtual desktops, which are a type of virtual machine that shares a common virtual desktop master image, sometimes referred to as a golden image. Horizon and vSphere support up to 4,000 desktops for each single replica of the virtual desktop master image, which enables significant storage savings over traditional full clone virtual desktops.

The concept behind a linked clone desktop is demonstrated in the following diagram, which shows the relationship between the master Replica Disk Read Only and the Linked Clone Disk.

When a pool of linked clone desktops is provisioned, a replica of the virtual desktop master image is copied to storage accessible by the Horizon ESXi servers. This replica will be used as a read-only copy of the virtual desktop master image; all writes...