Hi. I manage a vSphere 6.7 environment that mostly consists of Windows terminal servers and Linux web servers. Our campus has a Horizon environment (v7, I thiink) that I’m creating a Windows 10 image to use for some special projects. I’m not an admin on Horizon, although I may be able to get some mgmt access at some point. The Horizon manager is a great guy but is pretty busy, so I’m hoping to get some basic guidance on image prep without pestering him. The plan is for me to create a golden image and send him the vmdk. We’re both part of the same active directory forest but manage separate OUs.

Basic image prep – I’ve created a Windows 10 2004 Enterprise guest and installed apps like I normally would, and I’ve cleaned up temp files. I just found this page on optimizing the image, so I didn’t turn on auditing mode after the initial vm creation. I’m looking through it for other recommendations, but a lot of it seems to be tasks that the HZ mgr will need to do after he gets my vmdk.

Creating an Optimized Windows Image for a VMware Horizon Virtual Desktop | VMware

Restricted applications – Most of the apps I’ve installed are licensed for all users, but we have a few that will need to be licensed per paid user. I’d like to avoid having to create a different image for each paid app or combination of those apps. On my terminal servers, I control that by removing the NTFS permissions for the local users group and adding an AD group for that app where the vendor allows us to do that. Is there a different way to do that in Horizon?

Default user profile – I’m planning on creating unless there’s a more Horizon specific way to do it.

I’ve installed the horizon client and I’m planning to sysprep and shut down, then send the disk.

Am I missing any steps? Thanks very much for any assistance.