Boost Your Nested Home Lab (Part 2/3)

In the first post, we looked at AlacrityPC, a program that will help us boost the performance of our VMware Workstation-based nested home lab. In this second part of the series, we’ll figure out what to do with Windows services.

Systems Check

So Alacrity’s installed, and it enables us to choose which services and applications we want to change the running state of while our program of choice, in this case VMware Workstation, is running. How do you know which services are essential, and which you can safely shut down for a while?

Back when I was first introduced to AlactricyPC there was a handy website available that listed all the Windows services, their out-of-the-box settings, and recommended service states for varying degrees of performance vs. functionality. As luck would have it that site, Black Viper, is not only still around but has been kept current as new versions of the Windows client OS have been released.

To continue with our example, let’s configure Alacrity using the recommended safe Windows 10 service settings. Anywhere Black Viper recommends we disable a service, we will configure it with an Alacrity action of Stop Then Restart. This means that when we go to run VMware Workstation, any services flagged with that action will be stopped. Once we’re done with VMware Workstation and we close it, those services will be started again.

For convenience, here are a list of the Black Viper safe services that we’ll be configuring with a Stop Then Restart action. The service names displayed are those as you’d see then in AlacrityPC, which may differ a bit from the Black Viper display name.

Windows 10 Services that can be Safely Stopped

Service NameDefaultAction
dmwappuhshsvc Manual Stop Then Restart
Enterprise App Management Service Manual Stop Then Restart
Fax Manual Stop Then Restart
Geolocation Service Manual Stop Then Restart
Hyper-V Data Exchange Service Manual Stop Then Restart
Hyper-V Guest Service Interface Manual Stop Then Restart
Hyper-V Guest Shutdown Service Manual Stop Then Restart
Hyper-V Heartbeat Service Manual Stop Then Restart
Hyper-V PowerShell Direct Service Manual Stop Then Restart
Hyper-V Remote Desktop Virtualization Service Manual Stop Then Restart
Hyper-V Time Synchronization Service Manual Stop Then Restart
Hyper-V Volume Shadow Copy Requester Manual Stop Then Restart
Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) Manual Stop Then Restart
Microsoft iSCSI Initiator Service Manual Stop Then Restart
Microsoft Windows SMS Router Service Manual Stop Then Restart
Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Locator Manual Stop Then Restart
Retail Demo Service Manual Stop Then Restart
Sensor Data Service Manual Stop Then Restart
Sensor Monitoring Service Manual Stop Then Restart
Sensor Service Manual Stop Then Restart
Smart Card Device Enumeration Service Manual Stop Then Restart
SNMP Trap Manual Stop Then Restart
Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service Manual Stop Then Restart
Windows Mobile Hotspot Service Manual Stop Then Restart
Windows Remote Management (WS-Management) Manual Stop Then Restart
Work Folders Manual Stop Then Restart
Xbox Live Auth Manager Manual Stop Then Restart
Xbox Live Game Save Manual Stop Then Restart
Xbox Live Networking Service Manual Stop Then Restart

Ready for the Danger Zone

Now that we now what services we can safely do without while using our home lab, we need to configure Alacrity and get to boosting! Stay tuned for the third and last post in this series.

Featured image photo by mashleymorgan

Dee Abson

Dee Abson is a technical architect from Alberta, Canada. He's been working in the field of technology for over 20 years and specializes in server and virtualization infrastructure. Working with VMware products since ESX 2, he holds several VMware certifications. He is a 9x VMware vExpert. You can find him on Twitter and Mastodon.

6 Responses

  1. @deeabson says:

    New Post: Boost Your Nested Home Lab (Part 2/3) https://t.co/MGqtFhcX5g #homelab #howto #vdm30in30

  2. @xinity_bot says:

    Boost Your Nested Home Lab (Part 2/3) https://t.co/ww1YtUkmCx #General #HomeLab

  3. @deeabson says:

    ICYMI: Boost Your Nested Home Lab (Part 2/3) https://t.co/Cx6Ch1KkIv #homelab #howto #vdm30in30

  4. @deeabson says:

    ICYMI: Boost Your Nested Home Lab (Part 2/3) https://t.co/K2Ye8OLe8d #homelab #howto #vdm30in30 #ICYMI

  1. November 10, 2016

    […] is now installed and is waiting for us to configure it so we can boost VMware Workstation. In the second part of this short series, we’ll figure out what exactly we want to […]

  2. November 10, 2016

    […] of our nested home lab, first we were introduced to AlacrityPC, then we figured out which services we need to tame. Now it’s time to configure Alacrity and take to the […]

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