Hey all 
Very quick post today about a very very cool tool which VMware have released to optimise a desktop for VDI. This tool should be run on your master image whether you are using Citrix or VMware as it reduces the overall footprint that your OS will use which is critical in any VDI Deployment. I highly suggest that you use it for any new images that you create. It is fully compatible with Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Server 2012 R2. It’s in Beta for Windows 10 at the moment and nicely trashed my Win 10 VM when I ran it
If you head over to https://www.loginvsi.com/blog/520-the-ultimate-windows-10-tuning-template-for-any-vdi-environment you will see the Login VSI testing performed using this tool and the results are quite impressive. They managed to get a VSIMAX increase of 44% using their settings which you can download and apply using this template. Would you like 44% more headspace from your servers?
As you can see there are a few options when you launch the tool:
- Analyze – This will perform an analysis of your current settings and suggest settings from the tool’s baseline settings
- Optimize – This is where you will perform the optimization – note it will change hundreds of settings so please test carefully or review carefully before implementation
- History – This will provide a history of all previous actions
- Remote Analysis - This will enable you to analyse VM’s remotely
- My Templates - This is a pretty nice feature which enables you to create multiple templates so say for example if you have a different set of images with different requirements or different operating systems
- Public Templates – Killer feature in my opinion – if you have a really nice optimised image you can upload it to VMware and anybody can download it for use, nice community sharing
- References – bunch of URL’s to view more information
You can download the tools from here:
https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vmware-os-optimization-tool
Note when I ran the optimisations on my Windows 10 VM I got the following when I rebooted and it generally doesn’t seem very happy, but it is in BETA
Enjoy!