VMWare View 5.1 Suspend Timeouts and Force Suspend on Disconnect

[chewatt]

By the time of starting this discussion I've read hundreds of pages on optimizing VDI desktops with Win7 and WinXP and currently I have a well running "small" environment with 20 desktops and a well optimized base image. I started out by looking at 5 to 10 documents on optimizing a base image and I've compiled all the best features into one document.  All documents I've read without exception say to disable hibernation, sleep, screen savers, standby etc and I have followed these suggestions in my base image and I've had no problems.  The point of this discussion is to explore this further.  In all documents I've read they all say to disable these features but I haven't read any detailed explanations on the upsides and downsides of using hibernation or sleep modes in Windows so I can adjust these timeout values.  This post was prompted because I really want to be able to adjust the timeout values of how long it takes for a desktop to Suspend after a user logs out so I can reclaim resources back to my host for other desktops.  It appears the standard timeout value is approximately 2 minutes and this value doesn't work for my desktops that bounce in and out all day and need a snappy login but it works great for my users who log off and stay off for hours or days at a time.  Any thoughts or suggestions would be great.

[vmblogza]

Hi,

Basically Screensavers use IOPS and in the VDI environment you want to limit your IOPS per VM. In the VDI environment you basically will not have a need for Power Policies or Hibernation? What is the point? You set the power policy inside the View Administrator. "Power off on Logoff... ect"

Rgs

Pete

[chewatt]

Thank you for the response VMBlogza, however, the purpose of this post wasn't about screen savers.  It's specifically about hibernate/sleep functions and exploring the topic of how to put a VM in a state where it uses no IOPS during times where it may be sitting idle for days or weeks.

Thanks

[mittim12]

I use the power policy option in the View pool to shutdown machines not in use.   

[chewatt]

Thank you Mittim12 for the reply.  When you do your method of turning off VM's when not in use are your users ok with having to wait through the boot process to get their desktop?  How has this worked in your environment?  Are your users happy with that method?

Thanks

[mittim12]

This is only really applicable for floating pools and we set the policy to have enough desktops powered so that no one has to wait.   In our dedicated pools we leave them on all the time because people are not fond of waiting for their desktops to power on. 

[chewatt]

I'd much prefer to use the setting "Suspend" in View Manager, however, there aren't a lot of variables such as how much time of inactivity before suspend etc.  I'd like to control the environment a little more than just using the defaults.  Are there more settings I can tune on the feature built into View Manager?

Thanks.

[chewatt]

SOLVED

: In doing some more research I've discovered two nice features View Manager has that allow an admin to adjust how long a desktop will wait to go into suspend mode after the user has logged off of a desktop AND there is now a fix that allows an admin to force a desktop to go into suspend when a user has disconnected where previously the desktop would only suspend if logged off.  The instructions to set suspend timeouts that I found have a lot of typos so I'm not going to post them, however, if you do a search for pae-OptSuspend-Timeout with some other keywords like "view manager" etc you'll see several articles on how to use ADAM ASDI EDIT to modify the setting. I found an article on ThinkVirt.com so if you use that keyword in your search you'll see the article.  Furthermore, if you want to force a disconnected session to suspend you can read the MISCELLANEOUS Section in the View 5.0.1 Release Notes  http://www.vmware.com/support/view50/doc/view-501-release-notes.html for the setting.

I hope this helps anyone looking to adjust these settings.