Second Prompt for User Credentials in Remote Desktop Services

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.

Accessing a Cloud-Based Demo Environment - Destination NAT or Reverse Proxy?

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.

Slides (German): Warum UEFI das BIOS ablöst

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.

MVP 2012 for RDS

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 :-)

Slides (German): Warm anziehen Citrix! Windows Server 2012 Remote Desktop Services stehen vor der Tür

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.

Deploying Windows Server 2012 without Running the Installer

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.

XenApp Session Timeouts Explained

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.

Windows Recovery Environment (RE) Explained

Windows Recovery Environment (RE) is based on the Windows Preinstallation Environment (PE) and can be extended to be a minimalistic system to recover a somehow broken systen. Windows RE is configured in the boot configuration data to be the failover system for the primary boot entry. If the boot loader fails on the default entry, it will automatically try to boot into the recovery environment.

The Issues Caused by TS_AWARE (Concerning Shadow Keys)

I have recently published the shadow key companion which compiles all currently known information about shadow key in a single article. An important piece of information is the flag TS_AWARE for executables causing Windows not to produce shadow keys in install mode. Unfortunately, there is a downside to this flag that may well affect installation scripts.

Making the Switch to UEFI

The most prominent reason for thinking about booting through UEFI instead of BIOS is the availability of large drives. BIOS requires a MBR (Master Boot Record) formatted drive which is inherently limited to 2 TiB. But there are more very good reasons for making the switch. In this article I will provide a brief comparison of BIOS and UEFI before explaining how to create bootable devices for UEFI and install Windows on an UEFI system.