We have had this issue for a while and its never really been solved effectively. Environment is View 5.3 with Windows 7 32 bit hosts running as linked clones. We are not maintaining any users profiles, just blow the classrooms away. We try to start out with 24 gigs on each disk which allows us to install everything they need, but over time with the updates, the disk keeps growing and the person I did have managing this wouls just add disk space instead of fixing the problem. Everything works great until they hit about 40 gigs, then we start having provisioning issues. Not sure why this is, but it's likely related to storage. Its gotten better since we moved to Netapp from HP EVA. If anyone knows the magic number, then I would be interested since its came back to bite me multiple times
Anyway, back the point. The guys who used to work here would just let them grow. He left and I'm now looking back closely at the environment where is has let some of them get to 46 gigs. Looking around I see the c:\windows\Installer is taking up a lot of space. 10 gigs on some master images. I've deleted these files before without a lot of issues, but Microsoft says you should not just delete them, can't uninstall updates etc, blah, blah blah.
I was just wondering how other was handling this issue and if you had any better recommendations for managing this long term and keeping the disk size down.
Thanks Bruce