Got a customer that seems to think running Windows 11 single-session VDI with 2 cores and 12GB of RAM is optimal. My gut instinct says CPU is going to be a problem instantly. Do others concur? They have some fairly heavy client-server workloads and obviously the usual Office suite

It goes under the "IT DEPENDS" bucket. I have had some where 2 cpu are great, and others where they struggle. The hypervisor, app usage, and cpu type on the hypervisor are big factors as well.

Nutanix hypervisor I think, not sure on the CPU type yet. I can see, though, just from logging in, that the 2CPU instances really struggle to get going whereas a 4CPU instance is way more snappy. Win11 lists 2CPU as the "bare minimum for lightweight workloads", and I wouldn't class this Office/browser/client-server-apps setup as lightweight in anyone's book

2 vCPUs is balls, 3 is better, 4 is better again. But of course this all depends on overall ratio on the physical CPU itself. We pretty much start with 4 as guidance for the most part unless you really are not doing much

Perhaps they thought the apps they are going to use were memory dependent... crazy world where 2vC{U's can give you a proper desktop, but here we are.

windows 11 has really been doing a good job of showing that as the version increments, so do the compute requirements - i had someone some months ago try to tell me that they could use the same 4g/2c sized vm that worked for win10 and it took all my professional skills to not break out snickering. obviously the answer is to have something that can measure what they're doing over time to right size, but i've seen enough weirdness where 3vcpu has ended up as the magic number to keep a close eye on anything starting at 2 (which still breaks my head that only wants to see even numbers)

In cloud DaaS, we're mostly advising 4x16 as the bare minimum for Windows 11 for a good user experience.

I had a Windows 265 VM that was 2x8 and while it could bog down somewhat, it wasn't that bad in general. I was very surprised. It had O365 on it as well and ran without issue. I wasn't doing macro heavy excel stuff though, but it was ok

Yeah these have Crowdstrike and I can already see it doing lots of "stuff"

+1 on security stack. Compute requirements should be directly proportional to installed filter drivers 😅

And when they say Crowdstrike doesn't need exclusions, they are wrong.

I wonder what version of Windows will be the tipping point to finally look at something else... you can't keep increasing the requirements, soon we are all running CAD-like workstations to use calculator.

Bring back NT4. It flies on modern hardware. I know, I've labbed it

we all did our tuning on that one... how much can you kill and keep it running.

Well MS did announce their own linux distro......

well, I would say that the next step should perhaps not involve apps on a system.. and MS Linux, let's try to avoid that

Ill take crowdstrike with no exclusions over sentinel1 fully optimized any day though. At least CS only takes out the global IT world once every 10 years or so

Amen Brian, S1 is a disaster. We're still on 22.3 to keep our login times around 30 secs . Post 22.3 is like 2 mins even with exclusions. S1 has been working on it for over 2 years now.

"2 vCPUs is balls"... Agreed.

Is there a best practice as how your vms would be hardware configured ?

Would love a sidebar about the exclusions you all are using for Crowdstrike @Jeff Riechers - have a couple massive environments using CS and have some strange unexplained issues from time to time.

In all fairness to CS, we ran it for years with no exclusions and never had any issues - PVS win10 nonpersistent.