I'm working on some really cool stuff that I can't wait to show you! Here's a small glimpse of what's to come. While I was working on this big project of mine I came across a new tool written by the folks at VMware. It's part of their Flings program and I think it's genius! They're applications written by their engineers in their spare time. There's all kinds of really cool tools available. Check it out when you get a chance!
A little while back I wrote a blog called Windows 7 Optimization Guides for VDI - View and XenDesktop. Optimizing your Windows golden image has always been lots of fun and challenging, so I was so excited to see the VMware OS Optimization Tool available! It's designed to help you optimize not only Windows 10, but Windows 7, 8, 2008 and 2012!! How cool is that? It includes customizable templates to enable or disable Windows services per VMware's recommendations and best practices.
Just me being paranoid, but I'd suggest backing up, cloning or taking a snapshot of your golden image before applying any optimizations. That way if you're not happy with the changes, you can easily revert back to your pre-optimized image.
Let's take a look! Here's the tool running below. Start up the application on your golden image and select a template name, here I've chosen Windows10_beta (built-in). Click on the Analyze button and the tool will populate the right hand side with optimizations it would like to apply to the golden image. You can un-select optimizations if there's a setting you don't want applied. Click Optimize and the tool will apply the chosen optimizations.
And PRESTO you're done!
But wait, there's MORE! While searching around I found an article written by Login VSI - The Ultimate Windows 10 Tuning Template for any VDI Environment #VDILIKEAPRO. If you're not familiar with Login VSI, you MUST take a look. I've been a huge advocate of their product for years and I still can't say enough good things about it. In a nut shell, you set up your VDI environment, golden image and all, and their tool automates users logging in and running desktop workloads. So no synthetic loads, just users logging in, checking email, getting coffee, writing documents etc. After the run is complete you're presented with charts and an analysis. One of the metrics is the VSImax, which is a number for your VDI system as a whole where a certain number of users will start to cause degradation in the VDI environment. Pretty neat huh?
I was really happy to see Login VSI had a template for Windows 10, so I downloaded their template and loaded it into the VMware OS Optimization Tool. You'll be greeted with a new template that you can select from the template pull down.
From there, your golden image should be ready to roll!
So what did we learn today? Neil is working on something with Windows 10 and that VMware and Login VSI are cool! :-)
Until Next Time
-Brain
