Configuring guest operating systems

It is important to correctly configure your guest operating systems so that they run optimally in the virtualized environment. In this chapter, we will show you how to configure different operating systems, but these are some general guidelines you can follow for any kind of guest:

1. Install the flexVDI guest tools. They include device drivers for paravirtualized devices that will drastically increase the guest performance. They also include the tools and agents that enable some of flexVDI features, like Follow-me Printing and Single Sign-On.
2. Disable swap partitions/pagefiles. They will make clone images grow very fast. If you are getting out of memory errors in the guests, just increase their allocated RAM.
3. Disable fancy desktop effects. The virtual GPU is software based, and the Spice presentation protocol must transmit all the screen changes, so the perceived performance will drop if they have to show a full-screen animation, like a vanishing window.
4. Configure your virtual hard drives as SSD disks. You will avoid unnecessary write operations.
5. In template-based guests, disable system updates.

For information on particular guest operating systems, refer to the corresponding section:

• Windows