Windows 8 and Windows 7 Desktop Optimization Guide

This PDF guide from VMware has 2 important scripts embedded, which allows disabling unneeded services of W7 or W8 systems. The Windows 8 and Windows 7 Desktop Optimization Guide provides detailed specification of those services, and in order to use in corporate environments, you should check in details each of those service's function and validate (or not) the disabling. This guide is useful for optimizing W7 and W8 systems used in VDI environments like VMware Horizon View or Citrix Xen Desktop.

Authors: Charles A. Windom,  Tina de Benedictis, Jim Britt of Ensynch, Aaron Black. Plus more of the VMware technical staff which were testing those scripts.

There are two methods of optimizing those desktop OS images. The first one is traditional, where the other one leverages the usage of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) – it's free (about 4Gb download..)

• Traditional Method – you'll be installing with a media (or iso)> then install VMware tools > Optimize with a .BAT file > Install View agent and your  applications > Create VM Template
• MDT Method – Install your VM > Prepare MDT environment >Create MDT task sequence > deploy image to target VM

Windows 8 and Windows 7 Desktop Optimization Guide – The Content Chapters

• About – The overall process of optimization. The “how it works” section
• Creating an Optimized Windows Image – This is step-by-step guide which shows both methods.
• W7 and W8 Guest OS Customization – some further information concerning the specific optimization techniques which were used in this guide.
• Managing Horizon View Desktops – additional information concerning the view management as a whole.
• Appendix – here are the reference to all settings used and explained, together with some external links to different KB articles. You'll find also how-to create and use the *.bat scripts and if you're using Persona Management in your environment. You'll also find the The TS.xml file, which contains an example task sequence used when using MDT.

It's an indispensable help for consultants and infrastructure admins, which allows an indispensable optimization of VDI environments. Without those optimizations it isn't possible achieve optimal performance.

I'd like to quickly point out the attachments which can be found within the document. Those are simple text files, which allows to be saved as a *.bat files to be used for the optimization process.

The document comes from VMware website here and I can only highly recommend to download it – Windows 7 and Windows 8 Optimization Guide for Horizon View Virtual Desktops

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