Managing disk space Windows 7

[brucehopkins]

We have had this issue for a while and its never really been solved effectively. Environment is View 5.3 with Windows 7 32 bit hosts running as linked clones. We are not maintaining any users profiles, just blow the classrooms away. We try to start out with 24 gigs on each disk which allows us to install everything they need, but over time with the updates, the disk keeps growing and the person I did have managing this wouls just add disk space instead of fixing the problem. Everything works great until they hit about 40 gigs, then we start having provisioning issues. Not sure why this is, but it's likely related to storage. Its gotten better since we moved to Netapp from HP EVA. If anyone knows the magic number, then I would be interested since its came back to bite me multiple times

Anyway, back the point. The guys who used to work here would just let them grow. He left and I'm now looking back closely at the environment where is has let some of them get to 46 gigs. Looking around I see the c:\windows\Installer is taking up a lot of space. 10 gigs on some master images. I've deleted these files before without a lot of issues, but Microsoft says you should not just delete them, can't uninstall updates etc, blah, blah blah.

I was just wondering how other was handling this issue and if you had any better recommendations for managing this long term and keeping the disk size down.

Thanks Bruce

[Ray_handels]

Just my 2 cents but my expierence with Windows is that it will eventually grow over time and removing information from the installer folder could cause other problems.

I would say try and find out why you are having these issues with the machines? What is the error that you receive when creating a larger machine? We have 64GB machines without an issue.

When you create the pool (or if the pool is already created) what's the Storage Overcommit that you set? If you do have linked clone machines you can set it to Agressive.

Here is a link on how it works and what settings you can set.

VMware View 5.0 Documentation Center

[brucehopkins]

We have plenty of space. The issues before were most likely related to the IOPs on the HP EVA storage system we had. I've since moved to Netapp which has some SSD drives and it works a lot better. The checksum disk would get corrupt and we got rid of it creating those. So the errors may not be an issue in the future, but something in the past. Of course, then we talk about the speed of recomposing the machines. These people love changes and I like for them to create as quickly as possible. The larger the disk the longer it takes to create replicas.

I ran across something yesterday that I think I'm going to try. Most of the files in the installer directory are a result of Windows updates. i found where Microsoft is now releasing a rollup of all the updates in a single file. I'm going to see if I can slip stream these into the Windows 7 image and then it won't need to have as many updates downloaded. That should help it.

I've seen references of people have Windows 7 disks at 18 gigs, but I've never been able to get our disks that small. Not sure how they do it.

[ymagalif]

Bruce,

Some tips from my experience.

1. For recompose speed, SSD and faster storage is essential, and the primary solution. 40 GB is a not a large image, it is considered medium and we have fast recomposes with it, as long as it's on SSD and deduped storage (during a copy, deduped storage often only requires repointing links on the backend - so copies are faster).

2. One of the reasons your image is larger is due to installed applications. When you go to a non-persistent (floating), linked clone model, one of the design goals is to have a lighter master image, but add applications dynamically using VMware AppVolumes, ThinApp, or third party app technologies like Liquidware FlexApp. Some applications can be published using RDSH. You will need to apply this mix of technologies for serving different applications, and therefore reduce the size of your image.

Sincerely,

Yury Magalif

[bjohn]

Run Disk Cleanup as administrator to remove the Windows update files. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2852386

Use http://www.homedev.com.au/free/patchcleaner

[Hokey711]

I am having the same problem. I've researched this to death and can't understand why the Windows installer folder has grown to close to 40GB and the winsxs folder is almost 10GB with no way to clean it up. I don't want to trust some free 3rd party windows cleanup utility to my corporate desktops. 60GB should be plenty for a Windows machine running office and adobe on it but it's not anymore. I am beyond frustrated that when we rolled out our Windows 7 virtual desktops they were 40GB and we've had to increase them to 60GB which they promptly starting getting close to using all that extra 20GB. I can't find anything on the internet where corporate environments are dealing with this. All the tech articles are home users saying to just buy a cheap 1TB drive from Walmart. Well I can't do that since it's on an expensive SSD SAN! The VMware documentation on best practices lists the recommended disk size at 24GB which I know is laughable but 60GB doesn't sound unreasonable. We are moving to Windows 10 soon and are planning on giving them 80GB but now I am starting to rethink that and maybe going to go with 100GB? 120GB? I don't want to waste a support call with Microsoft but I'm thinking I may and blast them!

My daughter bought a new laptop without talking to me first and it had a 32GB SSD drive in it. I was like how is that possible? I told her she would run out of space fast and well 2 weeks after she got it she was out of space. She took it back...lol. Am I being too unreasonable here? Do people just not update their machines?? We have a monthly schedule to update everything.