After booting you see the Install Windows 7 screen, press Shift + F10 to open a command prompt.

Boot from your Windows 7 installation media.

(without System Reserve Partition and with 4k alignment)

Under ADVANCED, I/O Device Configuration: disable all Serial, and Parallel ports, as well as Floppy Controller.

Keyboard Features: change Numlock to ON.

Under MAIN, Legacy Diskette A: change to Disabled.

Power on virtual machine and open Console – virtual machine should be loaded into BIOS.

Go to Boot Options and check 'The next time the virtual machien boots, force entry into the BIOS setup screen.

Click on OPTIONS tab and then General, UN-Check 'Enable logging'.

Ensure Network Adapter type is VMXNET 3.

(anything over 3GB is a waste in 32bit Windows)

Right click on virtual machine and select Edit Settings.

Configure disk size to 30GB THIN provisioned.

Select which Network (VLAN) and under Adapter select VMXNET 3.

Under Guest Operating System select Windows and then Windows 7 32bit under the Version drop down.

Select a Name, Folder, Host, Cluster, and Storage.

Create New Virtual Machine – FILE > NEW > VIRTUAL MACHINE (CTRL+N).

Hopefully someone might find it somewhat useful and maybe even others can improve upon it. You could certainly just upgrade the virtual hardware on the 'Golden' image, I just prefer to start clean.Īt any rate, here’s my list. I like to have a new fresh machine using new virtual hardware from the start.

Luckily I don’t have to do these steps all the time as I’ll create the 'Golden' image when there is a new upgrade such as when we went from View 4.6 to View 5.0.1.

These are the few steps I do when creating a new 'Golden' image.

Vmware horizon windows 7