It's a common practice to optimize a Windows 7 virtual machine (VM) template (or image) specifically for VDI use. Usually such customizations include the following.
With that said the certain practices are quite debatable and vary between actual real-world deployments. Exact choices whether to disable this or that particular component depend on customer requirements and VDI usage patterns. E.g. in personalized virtual desktop scenario there's much less things to disable since the machine is not completely “stateless”. Some customers rely heavily on particular UI functions and other can relatively easily trade them off for the sake of performance or standardization (thus enhance supportability and potentially security). This is one of the primary reasons why Microsoft doesn't publish any “VDI Tuning” guide officially.
Though there are a number of such papers and even tools published either by the community or third parties. This Wiki page is aimed to serve as a consolidated and comprehensive list of such resources.
It makes an image lean but supportable. Fast, quick, usable (of course TEST TEST TEST for your applications and needs).
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Tord G.Nordahl edited Revision 7. Comment: added other languages
Pronichkin edited Revision 3. Comment: Added RDS Team blog post
Pronichkin edited Original. Comment: Added ProjectVRC whitepaper