White Papers

Sizing and Best Practices for Deploying VMware View 4.5
on VMware vSphere 4.1 with Dell EqualLogic Storage
27
storage platform) should be designed to handle the IO requirements during these periods.
Organizations should study the arrival rate (number of user connections per minute) and the
corresponding IOPS requirements when designing the VDI solution. Our test results showed that using
the EqualLogic PS6000XVS (hybrid SSD/SAS storage array with automatic hot-data migration between
device tiers) enabled us to support much higher peak I/O workloads while still supporting VM storage
density requirements.
6.2 Virtual Machine and Guest OS Configuration
There are many guidelines that need to be considered when optimizing how you configure and host
“Golden Master” VMware View images on ESX.
Please refer to the following VMware publications for
more details:
 VMware View Optimization Guide for Windows 7 :
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware-View-OptimizationGuideWindows7-EN.pdf
 Storage Considerations for VMware View :
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/view_storage_considerations.pdf
 Best Practices for Creating VMware View Golden Master Images :
http://www.ituda.com/Docs/VMware/Best_Practices_For_Creating_VMware_View_Golden_M
aster_Images.pdf
The guidelines break out into the two levels:
Optimizing the Windows OS
There are many guest desktop OS optimizations that can enhance performance, resource utilization,
reliability and manageability of VDI environments. A lot, if not all, of the default settings and behaviors
in any desktop OS are set for traditional standalone PC operation. Some of these default settings and
behaviors can be quite detrimental to performance and user experience in a VDI environment. Proper
care should be taken to set VDI-friendly values for guest OS system parameters and services. In our
case, Windows® 7 optimizations for VMware View were performed following VMware’s
recommendations. The optimizations we performed in our test environment:
• Disabled the following: Offline Files, AutoUpdate, Background Defragmentation, Last Access
Timestamp, Hibernate, Bug Check Memory Dump, Move to Recycle Bin
• Removed unnecessary Windows 7 components, such as: Tablet PC Components, Windows
Fax and Scan, Windows Gadget Platform, XPS Services and Viewer, Remote Differential
Compression
• Disabled unnecessary services, such as: Themes, Windows Defender, Windows Search,
Windows Update, Superfetch, Diagnostic Policy Service, Background Intelligent Transfer
Service, Base Filtering Engine, WLAN Autoconfig
• Disabled schedules for unnecessary tasks, such as: ScheduledDefrag, RegIdleBackup,
SystemRestore, WinSAT, DiskDiagnostic\DataCollector
Optimizing the VM within ESX
The following steps are best practices for supporting a VDI deployment:
• Disable virtual machine logging
• Disable serial and parallel ports for guest desktop OS