Voice of experience required: Windows 10 boot times in VMware Horizon 7 environment.

[implosiveturnip]

Hello all, my first time posting in this sub-forum!

I'm basically trying to get a small pool together to demo what VDI is capable of, and that we can use it to absolutely blitz our transition to Win 10.

I'm currently building a gold image based on Win 10 x64 enterprise 1809, but the boot times are abysmal.

I'm just wondering if any of you fine folk have managed to get sub 1-minute boot times on non-persistent Win 10 VMs in Horizon 7.4 or higher. Using LTSB is not an option for us, sadly.

I've been through this document:

https://techzone.vmware.com/creating-optimized-windows-image-vmware-horizon-virtual-desktop

We are using Mandatory profiles, as outlines in the above doc. I have also created a template for the Start live tiles (eg, none), have run the OS image optimization tool, and performed a few other tweaks but are still sitting on 2 min logins. Only 5 linked GPOs and no UEM policies at the moment. No drive mappings. Only using the local admin account as well.

VMs have 4 vcpus (1 socket 4 cores), 4gb RAM, 128mb Vram, and 80gb Hard drives. All flash storage.

Our win 7 machines, with only 2 cores and 3gb ram, boot in around 40 seconds on average, and that's with GPOs and UEM policies being applied.

Just looking for voices of experience if anyone has dealt with a similar issue!

 

[Hellsmk2]

Have you run the vmware optimization tool? Have you deleted all "stubpath" entries in hklm registry hive? Have you reduced the size of your default user profile? Do you have any group policy preferences applied?

I wouldn't bother with a mandatory profile... Complete waste of time for non-persistent.

30-50 seconds is considered good for non persistent logons on w10. Without app volumes, 30-40 should be easy enough.

Edit - would also recommend following Carl Stalhood's guide for anything you've missed. Best View resource online by a considerable margin.

https://www.carlstalhood.com/vmware-horizon-7-master-virtual-desktop/

 

[implosiveturnip]

Have you run the vmware optimization tool? Have you deleted all "stubpath" entries in hklm registry hive? Have you reduced the size of your default user profile? Do you have any group policy preferences applied?

I wouldn't bother with a mandatory profile... Complete waste of time for non-persistent.

30-50 seconds is considered good for non persistent logons on w10. Without app volumes, 30-40 should be easy enough.

Edit - would also recommend following Carl Stalhood's guide for anything you've missed. Best View resource online by a considerable margin.

https://www.carlstalhood.com/vmware-horizon-7-master-virtual-desktop/

Thanks for the link, will give it a proper read in the morning.

As for the mandatrory profile thing, I was under the impression that it was better for non-persistent vms? In our deployment it's part of the gold image and is only about 40kb. Everything I've read uptil now says it's much faster for logins, especially in win 10.

We will be using appvolumes (eventually), but really just want to focus on getting the logins down. I'll have to look into these "stubpath" registry entries, that's the first I've heard of them! Thanks for that.

 

[Hellsmk2]

Thanks for the link, will give it a proper read in the morning.

As for the mandatrory profile thing, I was under the impression that it was better for non-persistent vms? In our deployment it's part of the gold image and is only about 40kb. Everything I've read uptil now says it's much faster for logins, especially in win 10.

We will be using appvolumes (eventually), but really just want to focus on getting the logins down. I'll have to look into these "stubpath" registry entries, that's the first I've heard of them! Thanks for that.

There's zero difference in logon times that I've ever noticed. Also, with mandatory, you'll inevitably end up with temp profiles occasionally, which is reason enough to ditch them.

A well optimised profile copied to the default user profile with defprof works far far better in my experience.

Horizon is 50% of my job, so have done countless deployments over the years, and spent ridiculous amounts of time optimising images for logon times.

It is suggested to use mandatory profiles and they do work fine most of the time, by my own experience is that they're unnecessary and time consuming to get right.

Edit: App volumes feels like it is in a constant beta state. I'd use it sparingly. Each app stack assigned to a user will add a minimum of 6 seconds to logon (some far more).

Best tips for app volumes is to design your app stacks to assign as computer assignments instead of user assignments. That way they're assigned when the computer is created, rather than at logon.

Also the app volumes agent is installed completely unomptimised. There are registry tweaks that you absolutely have to implement for it to be less of a headache.

It's a turd of a product to get usable. Would suggest following the vmware community for it to see how bad it is... Nothing but issues. We no longer recommend it to customers without a very compelling use case.