Setting Up Desktop and Application Pools in View

Optimizing Windows 7 and Windows 8 for Linked-Clone Virtual
Machines
By disabling certain Windows 7 or Windows 8 services and tasks, you can reduce the growth of View
Composer linked-clone virtual machines. Disabling certain services and tasks can also result in performance
benefits for full virtual machines.
Benefits of Disabling Windows 7 and Windows 8 Services and Tasks
Windows 7 and Windows 8 schedule services and tasks that can cause View Composer linked clones to
grow, even when the linked-clone machines 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 machines. You can reduce
linked-clone growth by disabling these Windows services.
Windows 7 and Windows 8 introduce 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 or Windows 8 virtual machines. Disabling these services can reduce IOPS and improve
performance on full virtual machines and linked clones.
These best practices for optimizing Windows 7 and Windows 8 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
clones. 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 and Windows 8 Services and Tasks That Cause Linked-
Clone Growth
Certain services and tasks in Windows 7 and Windows 8 can cause linked-clone OS disks to grow
incrementally every few hours, even when the linked-clone machines 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 Windows 7 and Windows 8 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 or Windows 8 services that are shown in Table 3-9, verify that you took
the optimization steps in “Optimize Guest Operating System Performance for All Windows Versions,” on
page 37 and “Optimize Windows 7 and Windows 8 Guest Operating System Performance,” on page 38.
Setting Up Desktop and Application Pools in View
40 VMware, Inc.