VMware Mirage: Speed Up Centralization In Your Test Environments

I've been working with Mirage quite a bit over the past few months and I wanted to share a little tweak that can help speed up Centralization and other network intensive processes.

Disclaimer: As stated in the title of this post, this is great for Test environments. I wouldn't however recommend you configure this on your production environment unless you fully understand the impact of the changes. 

Disabling Bandwidth Throttling

By default Mirage enables bandwidth throttling. This can reduce the through-put between your desktops and your Mirage Servers to ensure you don't saturate you WAN connections. However during Testing there is a good chance that all of your desktops are on the same LAN as the Mirage Servers. In which case you may not care if you use all of the bandwidth available, especially if it is going to mean less waiting around.

To disable bandwidth throttling, the following steps need to be made on all desktops.

1. Open Notepad using "Run as Administrator"
2. Browse to the following file: C:\Program Files\Wanova\Mirage Service\Wanova.Desktop.Service.exe.config
3. Find the following entry: <add key="throttleEnabled" value="true">
4. Change value="true" to value="false"
5. Save the config file
6. Restart the Wanova Mirage Desktop Service in the services mmc.

You should now notice an increase in performance.