Windows 7 VM sleep

I had a problem with some Windows 7 VM's that was stopping people connecting by RDP until the mouse or keyboard was used in a vSphere console. I found alerts similar to this below in vCenter.

Windows 7 has power saving modes enabled by default out of the box and it turned out the VM's were going to sleep.  I don't find this useful in a virtualised environment.  I decided the best thing for my environment was to set some power saving in a group policy like below.  This keeps the VM's from sleeping.

 

Importing GPO from ISO/CD-ROM

This is a little something I noticed when importing group policies into different domains.  Originally I wanted to copy some policies from a production to some test domains that are logiccaly seperated.  I backed up all the production GPO's and burnt the backup to an ISO to mount as a CD-ROM in a VM.  The GPO's import fine but when trying to edit them afterwards I received access denied errors and no settings would change.  It turns out this is as the files and folders when imported will copy as read only from the CD.  Simply removing the read only attribute on the GUID named folder for the GPO and ensuring this filters down to child files and folders fixes the problem.