Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

In virtual desktop configurations (where many guest Windows installations reside on a virtualization stack and users connect to them via thin clients or RDP protocol apps), administrators are likely familiar with the variety of scripts used to tweak Windows 7 to make it a performant guest in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). The scripts were designed to reduce the unnecessary IO load on the disk subsystem of the VDI host(s) as well as reduce CPU usage (except when needed of course). These scripts made significant changes to the operating system and were supported to varying degrees by vendors, OEMs, and Microsoft.

In Windows 10, people I think are finding that this method of modifying the system wholesale is causing problems along with the solution. Either parts of the script do not work as intended/at all or, in some cases, the steps followed in the script cause the SYSPREP utility to outright fail to generalize the Windows instance for later capture.

User Experience Virtualization (UE-V) is an offering Microsoft has to help with this. Essentially, the desired outcome of all this configuration is that users have an expected configuration of Windows at login. Great! UE-V can have some of the user-based settings roam instead of forcing them all to be baked into the image where they are now causing problems. Those who are still going down the old path for Windows 10 will find that WaaS changes are causing them issues. It is a change of mindset to use Windows 10 in the enterprise. More talk about this in chapter 9, advanced configuration.