An administrator has deployed a Windows 11 desktop pool brokered by VMware Horizon.

According to Nutanix "Omnissa Horizon on Nutanix Best Practices" (formerly VMware Horizon), Windows system services that create excessive background I/O must be optimized for VDI environments. Specifically, the Windows Search (Indexing) Service is a common cause of high CPU and disk I/O. In a non-persistent environment, if the indexing service is active, it continuously attempts to crawl the file system and update the index database during the user session. This generates a large number of small, random writes (IOPS) which land in the Flash Tier (Hot Tier/Oplog).

The behavior described—usage ramping up during business hours (as users create data/emails) and coming down during off-hours—aligns with the Curator process. Curator scans the cluster periodically (typically every 6 hours or during low load) to perform Tiering (moving cold data from SSD to HDD) and cleanup. If indexing is enabled, the "hot" index data fills the SSD tier during the day; Curator then destages this data or consolidates it during the scan. To resolve the performance impact and unnecessary flash consumption, the administrator must disable the Windows Search service or configure it correctly in the Golden Image.