Enterprise edition.For the 32 - bit vs. 64 - bit decision, I generally recommend using whatever version you
use on your physical desktops in the organization to avoid a large amount of
additional software testing. Obviously, if you have 64 - bit desktop applications and if
you need more than 4 GB of memory, you will need to use the 64 - bit version of
Windows. The one downside of 64 - bit Windows is that it uses around 2 GB of
additional disk space per virtual machine, but that is really the only difference in
overhead. Memory and processor are about equal.
Once you decide on the operating system version, there are many steps to optimize
the image that will be the gold image and template for all the VM instances that will
be created for the VDI collection. You will likely be running hundreds of instances of
this VM template, so you want to optimize it as much as possible. Microsoft has great
resources to help with this. I recommend the following:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/ 6 / 0 / 1 / 601 D 7797 - A 063 – 4 FA 7 - A 2 E 5 –
74519 B 57 C 2 B 4 /Windows_ 8 _VDI_Image_Client_Tuning_Guide.pdf. This is a
great tuning guide that talks about OS considerations and customizations, services
to disable, and software such as malware usage. This is a mandatory read.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/jeff_stokes/archive/ 2013 / 04 / 09 /hot-off-the-presses-
get-it-now-the-windows- 8 - vdi-optimization-script-courtesy-of-pfe .aspx. This is a
great script to automate most of what is discussed in the previous reference. It also
has some guidance at the start of the script for actions to be performed on the
image. Although it is for Windows 8 , it works for Windows 10 as well.You may also choose to install certain applications into the image. Generally, I
recommend keeping the image as light as possible; don’t install many applications
into the image because each application update will require an update to the image.
Instead, use technologies such as App-V and RemoteApp to deliver the applications. At
times you may still have to install applications into the image, but try to keep these to
a minimum. You must not install modern applications into the reference image,
because you have to run Sysprep at the end of the image creation process and modern
applications are currently not understood by Sysprep, which means that the
applications will have to reinstall anyway during the template’s deployment in the VDI
collection.
On this same theme, don’t use a Microsoft account when creating the reference image.
Use a local account, because you also don’t want to join the reference image to the
domain, which would be removed during the Sysprep process and can confuse things.
Once the image is the way you want it, the next step is to prepare it to be used by an
RDS collection. This involves generalizing it, which is achieved by running Sysprep.
On Windows 10 Enterprise, prior to running Sysprep, I had to uninstall the Candy
Crush Saga and Twitter Windows applications. This was because I was running the
1511 branch, which included the new Consumer Experiences feature that adds certain
applications if the machine is connected to the Internet. This can be disabled through