While at TechDays in Toronto, Richard talks to Rodney Buike about virtualizing desktops. Rodney digs into how Citrix’s XenDesktop can let you use Windows 7 applications on your iPad! The conversation also explores the use of application virtualization to minimize storage use and simplify software updates, as well as an approach to using desktop virtualization to keep older workstations up and running for longer. VDI is coming of age, and Rodney digs into how to get things done.
|
||||||||
|
Disclaimer These postings are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. You assume all risk for your use. |
I recently posted a set of articles on deploying Citrix XenDesktop. XD can use Hyper-V R2 and SCVMM R2 as it’s virtualization and management layer but doing so does require a few configuration changes to SCVMM for optimal performance. While not mandatory they will ease management especially as your VDI infrastructure grows. In a large (150+ hosts) environments one of the recommendations is to enable Server Optimized Garbage Collection. Enabling this replaces the default Workstation Garbage Collection and reduces the CPU utilization on the VMM server. Even if you do not have that many hosts in your VDI infrastrucutre it is still recommended to enable this to reduce SCVMM CPU utilization. To enable server-optimized garbage collector (GC) on the VMM server, create a file that is named vmmservice.exe.config place it into the %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Program Files\Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2\Bin directory on the VMM server. The file should contain the Continue reading SCVMM VDI Configuration I’ve been helping out a few companies with their Windows 7 deployments and a common question that comes up is around branding. Branding is simply customizing the logon background, user account picture and in rare cases even the wallpaper and theme. So I thought I’d share the two more obscure tasks, the logon background image and the user account picture. User account picture It is quite easy to force a specific user account picture. There are two default BMP files, user.bmp and guest.bmp, located in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\User Account Pictures (you have to enable Show Hidden Files and Folders). Simply create two new BMP files that are 128×128 pixels in size and replace user.bmp and guest.bmp with these files (the names have to be user and guest and it has to be a BMP file). Then in AD you can set a policy to enable “Apply the default user logon picture to all users” which Continue reading Branding Your Windows 7 Install I know a lot of people using XP Mode to solve app compat issues as they move to Windows 7. It is simple enough to deploy and great for the few user scenarios where you don’t want to deploy MED-V. Managing the XP Mode VMs is an important task and the easiest way to manage it, outside of deploying MED-V, is to join it to the domain. That way you can manage it the same way you manage all the other machines in your domain. Joining the XP Mode VM to the domain is done the same way as any other machine but there are a few permissions that need to be configured to get it to work properly once it has been joined. Because the local user context will be changed from the default local account in XP Mode to a domain account you will need to add Domain Users Continue reading Joining XP Mode VM to the Domain One of the new features in IE9 is the ability to pin a website to the taskbar and include items in the Jump List. With the new site under construction and IE9 close to complete I decided to add this functionality to the new site. Pinning is easy and doesn’t require any configuration. Just grab the URL and drag it to the taskbar.
To add a Jump List takes a little configuration. The new site is built on WordPress so I will use that as an example but the process is pretty close on any site. On your WordPress site browse to WP-ContentThemesTHEME_NAME and open header.php for editing. Add the following code to your header.php anywhere in between the <head> </head> tags. <meta name=”application-name” content=”YOUR_WEBSITE_NAME“/> Continue reading IE9 Pinning and Jump Lists One of the more frustrating issues with devices and drivers is the Unknown Device. This little tip should make it a little less frustrating. An unknown device will always report a Hardware ID. You can use this ID to determine what the hardware is and that should make finding the driver easier. While the PC vendor may not supply one the hardware vendor should. To determine what the hardware is open Device Manager, right-click on the item and select Properties. Under the Details tab select Hardware ID from the drop down list.
Take note of the ID and then browse to http://www.pcidatabase.com and enter the Vendor ID and the Device ID and the database will provide the information required. In the example in the screenshot I entered 8086 as the Vendor ID (VEN_8086) and 10EA as the Device ID (DEV_10EA) and it was determined that the device in Continue reading Determine Driver for Unknown Devices During a deployment with MDT you can add additional applications that will be installed during the OS deployment. This is the ideal time to install web plugins such as Flash and Silverlight or any other component that gets updated frequently. It is much easier to package an application and edit a task sequence than it is to rebuild an image. To start the process open up your Deployment Share, right-click on Applications and select New Application. Specify whether the application has source files or not, in this case we are using Silverlight which does have source files.
Fill in the Details page with the application details. This will help you identify the application version in the deployment wizard as well as the list of applications.
Browse to the directory where the source files are located and select Next.
The friendly name of the application Continue reading Package Web Plugins with MDT 2010 The otherday I wrote about how you can do a system requirements validation in MDT 2010 Update 1 to ensure the hardware meets the requirements of the OS being deployed. One thing I discovered in lab testing is that Virtual PC7 reports the CPU back to MDT as a 1MHz CPU. Naturally this will cause issues when you try and do a test deployment to a Virtual PC7 VM.
The workaround is simple, just remove the processor speed check in the New Computer – Validate section of the Task Sequence.
Hope that helps! Microsoft has a set of minimum and recommended hardware requirements for Windows 7. There are some great, free, tools available to asses your current environment and there is functionality built into MDT 2010 Update 1 to verify that the hardware you are deploying too meets these requirements. Most importantly Update 1 added a processor speed check to ensure you are not deploying to machines with CPUs that are too slow. There are two places in the task sequence that will validate the system requirements.
You can edit these to match the requirements you have put in place based on your organizations needs. MDT 2010 is a great tool you can use to deploy Windows 7 in your environment. I allows you to use what is known as LTI or Lite Touch Installation to install Windows. It is called LTI because someone needs to touch the machine in the form of booting it up selecting a task sequence and answering a few questions in the LiteTouch Wizard. You can reduce the amount of prompts and make it “lighter” with some tweaking of MDT. When you kick off the MDT LiteTouch Wizard the first thing it asks you for is the credentials of an account that has permissions to access the deployment share. This can be a domain account or a local account on the MDT server. You can provide this to the deployment technicians or include it in the bootstrap.ini. To include it in the bootstrap.ini right-click on the deployment share and select Properties. Continue reading Customizing MDT 2010 Wizards |
|
||||||
|
Copyright © 2012 The Lazyadmin.com - All Rights Reserved |
||||||||
.png)
.png)
.png)
