Today I have come across one of those weird issues that take a lot of time to analyze and resolve. One single file was not replicated using DFS-R. But if the content was copied to a new file, replication worked as expected. Let me show you what caused this behaviour.
After finally feeling familiar with PowerShell Desired State Configuration (PSDSC), I decided to begin expanding the capabilities provided by the resource kits published by Microsoft. What better area to focus on than Remote Desktop Services?! Therefore, I have created a new DSC resource for Deploying Remote Desktop Services using PowerShell Desired State Configuration: cRemoteDesktopServices.
Lately, I have been working with a vendor to implement an LOB application in different customer environments. In the course of those troubleshooting actions, I learnt a lot about the internal mechanisms of Windows Server to help applications behave in environments utilizing Remote Desktop Services (with and without XenApp). In this post, I’d like to share my findings about INI File Mapping, a mechanism to prevent applications from using INI files.
Two months ago, I urged you to participate in the yearly survey of Project Virtual Reality Check called “State of the VDI and SBC union”. I am really happy to share some of the results with you.
I have recently been working on node configuration for PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) involving the requirement for creating an external virtual switch without a virtual network adapter in the management OS. Unfortunately, the DSC resource called xHyperV contains a bug preventing to create a Hyper-v virtual switch without a vNIC:
In one of my posts about PowerShell Desired State Configuration, I presented several methods for assigning and managing GUIDs to pull nodes. The PowerShell team replied in their blog explaining the security issues with pull servers. But finally a solution is available to secure access to #PSDSC node configuration.
If you are using Machine Creation Services (MCS) extensively, you strongly depend on the hosting infrastructure. But sometimes it becomes necessary to reorganize the structure inside the hosting infrastructure. In my case, a customer needed to rename clusters, datastores and virtual networks inside VMware vCenter. Unfortunately, machine catalogs cannot be reconfigured to accomodate for those changes. The only way to repair machine catalogs is to recreate them. That’s why I have created the following PowerShell cmdlets.
After describing how to inject a Desired State Configuration into virtual machines or virtual hard disks, I started wondering what I need to do to a newly created VM to configure it to use a pull server. Not only will I outline the steps necessary to achieve this, I will also publish the code for this.
When you are designing node configuration of increasing complexity, you will soon realize that some elements should be easily reusable to clean up your code and prevent duplicate code. Although Microsoft provides an introduction to reusing configurations, it does not properly document the poor state of nested configurations in PowerShell 4.0. In this post I will explain how those work and what caveats to expect from them.
In 2009, Ruben Spruijt ([@rspruijt]https://twitter.com/rspruijt)) and Jeroen van de Kamp ([@thejeroen(https://twitter.com/thejeroen)) started Project Virtual Reality Check (Project VRC). Since then, they have published numerous, valuable whitepapers with performance results and best practices with regard to different hypervisors, application virtualization solutions, Windows operating systems, antivirus solutions and Microsoft Office versions.