Ever since the Surface Pro was announced by Microsoft (review on The Verge), I was sure that this will become my new primary device. Two months ago I had the chance to get my hands on one of them and have been using it ever since. This will not be yet another review. It will be about my experiences, my enthusiasm and the compromises I had to take.
It has been rather quiet in this blog and on Twitter as well. In fact, I have been working on a related project with three other IT Pros that has consumed a lot of my available time. I can finally break the silence and make the announcement that in Juli, Galileo Press will publishing our (German) book about Hyper-V and System Center.
When Helge Klein and Ingmar Verheij publicly displayed their start menu, I found this to be a very intruiging idea. As I have switched to Windows 8 starting with the Consumer Preview in February 2012, I don’t have a start menu anymore. But still there are several applications that I use regularly.
In a recent deployment of Remote Desktop Services with Windows Server 2012, I experienced a second prompt for credentials. It occurred after successfully authenticating with Remote Desktop WebAccess and launching a RemoteApp from the browser. This blog explains why the second prompt is shown and how to get rid of it.
Several months ago I moved my entire demo environment to the cloud. Before that I was struggeling with the limitations of my laptop. Instead of sacrificing mobility for performance, I decided that its worth the extra money to rent a hardware box in the cloud. But then I was facing new obstacles when demonstrating use cases. The virtual machines are isolated in a virtual LAN which is not accessible publicly. In the end, it became a question of using destination network address translation (DNAT) or a reverse proxy to seemlessly access the virtual LAN.
On 12.10.2012 I held a session at the NRWconf in Wuppertal about why vendors are pushing UEFI to replace BIOS with the release of Windows 8. Attached you’ll find my slides.
I am really proud to announce that I have been awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Remote Desktop Services (RDS) in 2012. It has been for the third time in a row :-)
On 08.09.2012 I held a session at the ice conference in Lingen comparing the new Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2012 with Citrix XenApp. A big thank you to my audience for placing me second - after Nils Kacienski who became Speaker of the Year.
With the release of Windows Server 2012, I wanted to upgrade my test and demo environment as quickly as possible. As with many hosting offerings, I do not have physical access to my dedicated server but do get two hours of remote console access for free. Therefore, I needed a way to deploy Windows Server 2012. This article documents how I successfully installed Windows Server 2012 on the second hard disk from a running Windows Server 2008 R2.
In a centralized environment such as a XenApp farm, users share resources with one another. A thoroughly designed platform will be able to handle all prospected users as well as provide contingencies for failures and maintenance tasks. When sizing a XenApp farm, resources as well as licenses need to be calculated for the concurrently connected users (CCU) which may well be only a small fraction of the total number of users. From an architectural point of view, it is very desirable to free resources when they are held by idle users to make them available to other sessions.
XenApp offers several timeouts to manage inactivity and free resources. This article explains how they work (including session pre-launch and session lingering) and what this means for your design.