Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1, and Windows 10 schedule services and tasks that can cause instant clones and linked clones to grow, even when the machines are idle. The incremental growth of the OS disk can undo the storage savings that you achieve when you first create the clones. You can reduce growth in disk size by disabling these Windows services.
Windows guest operating systems schedule services such as disk defragmentation to run by default. These services run in the background if you do not disable them.
Services that affect OS disk growth also generate input/output operations. Disabling these services can reduce IOPS (input/output operations per second) and improve performance for any type of desktop machines.
These best practices for optimizing Windows apply to most user environments. However, you must evaluate the effect of disabling each service on your users, applications, and desktops. You might require certain services to stay active.
For example, disabling Windows Update Service makes sense for instant clones because the OS is refreshed each time a user logs off, and for linked clones if you refresh or recompose regularly.
