Optimizing Windows 7 For Linked-Clone Desktops - VMware View Manager 4.5 Admin Manual

VMware View Administrator's Guide

Optimizing Windows 7 for Linked-Clone Desktops

By disabling certain Windows 7 services and tasks, you can reduce the growth of View Composer linked-clone
desktops. Disabling certain services and tasks can also result in performance benefits for full virtual machines.
Benefits of Disabling Windows 7 Services and Tasks
Windows 7 schedules services and tasks that can cause View Composer linked clones to grow, even when the
linked-clone desktops are idle. The incremental growth of linked-clone OS disks can undo the storage savings
that you achieve when you first create the linked-clone desktops. You can reduce linked-clone growth by
disabling these Windows 7 services.
Windows 7 introduces new services and schedules older services, such as disk defragmentation, to run by
default. These services run in the background if you do not disable them.
Services that affect OS disk growth also generate input/output operations per second (IOPS) on the Windows
7 virtual machines. Disabling these services can reduce IOPS and improve performance on full virtual machines
and linked clones.
Disabling certain services also might benefit Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems.
These best practices for optimizing Windows 7 apply to most user environments. However, you must evaluate
the effect of disabling each service on your users, applications, and desktops. You might require certain services
to stay active.
For example, disabling Windows Update Service makes sense if you refresh and recompose the linked-clone
desktops. A refresh operation restores the OS disks to their last snapshots, deleting all automatic Windows
updates since the last snapshots were taken. A recompose operation recreates the OS disks from a new snapshot
that can contain the current Windows updates, making automatic Windows updates redundant.
If you do not use refresh and recompose regularly, you might decide to keep Windows Update Service active.
Overview of Windows 7 Services and Tasks That Cause Linked-Clone Growth
Certain Windows 7 services and tasks can cause linked-clone OS disks to grow incrementally every few hours,
even when the linked-clone desktops are idle. If you disable these services and tasks, you can control the OS
disk growth.
Services that affect OS disk growth also generate IOPS on the Windows 7 virtual machines. You can evaluate
the benefits of disabling these services on full virtual machines as well as linked clones.
Before you disable the Windows 7 services that are shown in
steps in "Optimize Windows Guest Operating System Performance,"
Guest Operating System Performance,"
56
Table
on page 55.
4-7, verify that you took the optimization
on page 54 and "Optimize Windows 7
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