Installing WES 2011 CTP2 on a VM – it’s likely that 2Gb Flash will be sufficient? If you want Windows 7, and only 1.5Gb – will this be *THE* VDI base OS of choice?

Jan 21

Installing WES 2011 CTP2 on a VM – it’s likely that 2Gb Flash will be sufficient? If you want Windows 7, and only 1.5Gb – will this be THE VDI base OS of choice?

Fun and Cool Stuff, Hardware, Microsoft, Remote Protocols, Thin Clients, VDI, VMware, Virtualization, Windows 7, XPe Add comments

Just a brief update as to some of the changes that I have discovered in WES 2011 CTP2 (as opposed to the original CTP) – this was simply built on a default VM Template based on Windows 7.

Also some useful reference links:

Please review the screenshots below (sorry about the quality, I’ll redo them this week)

There are additional Templates (including Thin Client) that seem to have most of what people would need to get themselves started
The Summary page then indicates anything that’s not there – in this case the VMware Drivers were missing – I just ignored this and moved on, once completed it appears to have managed to find it and installed it
Disk Footprint
- This is a huge improvement on the first CTP – Minimal install used to be 650Mb, and just adding Explorer ONLY saw it jump to 2.6Gb
- Estimated OS footprint was listed as 1946Mb for the Thin Client template
- After installation it appeared (at least in the VM as only 1.57Gb)
- To be fair – there does not appear to be too much installed by default though?
It looks just like Windows 7 – seriously
So without even telling it what HW I have just check out the listing from Device Manager – only two items were not sorted!!
No drivers were installed or referenced by me – I just let the wizard do its thing and here it is with the Internet working
One curious thing I noted was that there is no RUN command, or Search function in the Start Menu, not that this is a bad thing on an intended Thin Client?
I was able to check that both FBWF and EWF is installed by default
As things stand I’d say this is a huge leap forward by Microsoft from the disk space point of view as it now looks quite likely that with some judicious pruning then a relatively useful Image can be created to simply act as the dedicated Client Device for Citrix, VMware VDI instances
If you’d like to get your own copy of the Image Builder Wizard (IBW) then log on to connect.microsoft.com to download

So after thinking on this some more I had the following thoughts?

This is essentially Windows 7 “super lite” and appears to be pretty much compatible with everything
It’s so easy to build a new runtime it no longer needs a developer to create bespoke instances?
Comes with the choice of enabling either Enhanced Write Filter (EWF) or File Based Write Filter (FBWF) to protect the base image
A “Thin Client” install is only 1.5G in size – well down from the standard Windows 7 with Office reaching more like 20Gb
Sure – the terms of the EULA specifically prohibit the *install* of Full MS Office Products
But that doesn’t preclude any Application Streaming or Virtualization efforts?
At only USD$90 a runtime version, and only 1.5Gb – will this be *THE* VDI base OS of choice?
It’s small, light, cheap AND it is non-persistent straight out of the box – it’s certainly worthy of some consideration?