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VMware Horizon supports two guest operating systems for desktop pools. Not all features are available with both operating systems because of the architecture of the individual operating systems. While only one image can be used per pool, multiple pools can be created, one for each virtual machine role.
The behavior of Windows desktops in a VDI environment can vary greatly. Because of the number of services and process in Windows, the host load can vary based on customizations that are applied to the guest operating system.
One of the best ways to reduce CPU and disk load from a Windows virtual machine is to use the VMware OS Optimization Tool. This tool is a consolidated interface that can be used to change the behavior of virtual machines to reduce their hardware requirements. Be careful if choosing the most-restrictive configurations, which can cause applications or even Windows features to stop working. This tool is designed to reduce the effort of optimizing Windows, but it requires testing of the configuration for all user applications.
Another tool that was mentioned previously in this paper is VMware DEM. This tool redirects user data to one or more file shares based on certain conditions. This capability allows directing different types of data to different locations. User-profile data and documents can be pointed to home directories that are replicated. Temporary data of applications that does not need protection is placed on volumes with no data protection enabled. This approach reduces replication traffic and the overall storage load.
Horizon supports virtual desktops on Linux with some caveats and restrictions on versions and distributions. For details, see the VMware product documentation about the System Requirements for Horizon for Linux. The storage requirements are determined more by the applications that are supported than the base operating system. This document does not address the variations in Linux configurations.