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w00005414
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

speeding up login times for linked clone Windows 7 desktops

Hi all,

we have a couple windows 7 linked clone pools and we want to try and speed up the logon times. Since they are linked clones they get nuked after log out so the person's Windows profile needs to be recreated on every logon. On one pool we turned on a group policy that redirects the desktop and my documents folder to a server and that cut down the log in time from about 70 seconds to about 53 seconds.... but people are still saying that the time period is too long.

We are going through the default user profile (that gets copied to the new user's profile) trying to slim it down in size, it is now about 70 MB.... hopefully that will help.

We allocate 1.5 GB of memory and one processor to these desktops... anyone getting quicker results using more mem or CPU?

Also, I remember there was some microsoft tool for XP that let you create a user's local profile from the command line, any doing that in their master image for all their users?

Thanks

9 Replies
abirhasan
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Have a check  Windows 7 optimization guide to see if anything there can be of assistance....

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware-View-OptimizationGuideWindows7-EN.pdf

abirhasan   
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w00005414
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi abirhasan,

Yes, I went through that guide when I initially set up the pool about a year ago.

Once the person is in their Windows 7 session it is fast, it just seems to be getting to the desktop which is the problem. The welcome screen appears for about ten seconds and then the rest of the wait time reads something to the affect of "Prepariong the desktop" I believe.

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Makian
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hello, may i suggest you check out the User Profile Management utility available from the following 3rd party vendor ?. Using this utility you can setup all users to share the same existing local profile on the VM (pretty much eliminates the 'preparing desktop' phase ).

http://www.forensit.com/desktop-management.html

I can confirm it has been tested and worked great with in Win7x64 image within our View v5 environment. Only problem was that it currently "breaks" the passthrough authentication of the view client (means users have to login again at the Windows desktop).

Forensit tech support have advised me that they are currently (as of last week) investigating to see if they can overcome this problem.

WakeColl
Contributor
Contributor

We did a lot of work last summer to try and optimise logon times with Windows 7 and roaming profiles. First thing to say is use Group Policy Preferences sparingly. Back in the XP days we had everything in a kixtart script. When GPP came along we moved over to that and had loads of registry and file preferences set up. As these process synchronously at logon it can add a long delay. Removing the preferences and putting them back into the kixtart script knocked a good 15 seconds (at least) off logon time. GPP is very convenient, but if it gets too busy it just kills logon times. I would suggest you only use it for preferences that require "SYSTEM" user privileges.

As for "Preparing your desktop", this can be cut down drastically by deleting the Active Setup "StubPath" registry values located under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components. For a quick explanation of Active Setup see here. However, I would only recommend doing this if you configure IE, Themes etc with Group Policy and test thoroughly before doing this in your production environment.

At the very least, if you do not use Windows Mail in your environment I would suggest you definitely remove its stubpath value at HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components\{44BBA840-CC51-11CF-AAFA-00AA00B6015C}. Also set the "IsInstalled" value under this key to 0. We found that this was the cause of the longest delay at "Preparing your desktop", as everytime a user logged into the system Windows Mail created a new 25MB database! Deleting the stubpath and setting IsInstalled to 0 stopped this and really helped speed up logon times.

Phoenycks
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I'd like to inquire as to why the profiles are being constantly recreated - can you tell us more about the pool configuration? Is it persistent or floating (I'm assuming floating)? Do you use roaming profiles?

Off the top of my head, this sound like Persona configuration would be ideal - it's similar to Windows Roaming Profiles, but more efficient. Is there any reason users wouldn't have persistent profiles? Are they intended to be volatile?

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w00005414
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Enthusiast

Hi all,

Thanks for the suggestions, I will look into the User Profile Management utility, we already use DefProf from the same company and it has been a life saver. That stinks that it can't do pass through authentication so hopefully they will get that working.

WakeColl, I do use a lot of group policies to customize these desktops and I have them separated out into individual ones for ease of administration. I'll start working on finding other ways to accomplish the same configurations. I haven't used Kixtart in about 10 years so thanks for the suggestion 🙂

I did notice that Windows Mail was creating a 25 MB file within the new user's profile and I tried removing that StubPath and settting the IsInstalled to "0" but I think it only shaved off a second at best.

Phoenycks, we are using floating (non-persistent) linked clone desktops. I am not using true roaming profiles but in one pool I use a group policy to redirect the Desktop and My Documents folder to a back end server. I think that shaves off about 15 or so seconds in the profile creation process compared to my other pools. We use floating desktops because I was asked to mimic software that was used here in the past called DeepFreeze. BTW, what is "Persona configuration", I have never heard of it?

Thanks all

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w00005414
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks for all of the suggestions. I went through all of the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components entries and one by one removed any StubPath entries and set the corresponding IsInstalled value to "0" and it shaved off a second or two here and there but what really knocked off a ton of time was the Windows Mail Active Setup value located here

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components\{44BBA840-CC51-11CF-AAFA-00AA00B6015C}

Like someone on this post said, it creates a Windows Mail database (or index... or something) for every user and our users will not be using Windows Mail on these computers.

A great tool for figuring out what is getting started during boot up is AutoRuns from Microsoft's Sysinternals folks.... I highly recommend it!

trb48
Contributor
Contributor

I decided to email forensit.com's tech support to see when/if they would support virtual desktops. Here is their response:

Thank you for your interest in ForensiT User Profile Manager. We are certainly aware of this issue.

User Profile Manager uses a component called a "Credential Provider" in order to get the credentials of the user logging on (so that it can then assign the correct profile.) However, using a custom credential provider leads to the pass through issue you mention. As this official Microsoft blog post states, “This is an expected behavior and it is by design and there is no legitimate way to avoid it”:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/winsdk/archive/2009/07/14/rdc-and-custom-credential-providers.aspx

To avoid the problem we have to change the architecture of the software. This is obviously not a simple fix.

We are working on a solution that avoids the use of a Credential Provider. We hope to release a new version of User Profile Manager next year.

Sounds promising. This would really help all of us reduce our login times.

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w00005414
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi trb48,

To get around the log in time issue we are going to be going with a product called Liquidware Labs ProfileUnity, from what we have heard and seen it is pretty amazing.

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