Quick and easy tip – Xenapp published applications appearing on Start menu? client application folders to the rescue

Really quick and easy one this – just been noticing a build-up of published apps sitting themselves in the root folder on start menu. Quick tip to alleviate this is if you want to place into sub-folders use “Client Application Folders” in the published application properties – I find that “client’s Start Menu..” option doesn’t work as well

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Windows 10 Tech Preview and RDSH

Thought it’d be a good time to give this a whirl. In order to stand up a relevant POC for RDSH (am testing through Azure) following guide is very useful

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dn451351.aspx

In my environment left the connection broker and web gateway servers as 2012r2 boxes and simply added a Windows 10 Tech Preview server as my RD session host server.

Will look into providing a more enhanced user feel as out of the box as per previous releases the server version isn’t initially tailored for a user base. Note too Multipoint in the screenshot. Will go into more detail about that piece again

System Center Orchestrator 2012 r2 Quick and Dirty Installation Guide

As it says on the tin 🙂
System Center Orchestrator 2012 r2 Quick and Dirty Installation Guide

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 r2 – the quick and dirty install guide

So prior to the SCVMM 2012 r2 Installation I had in place :

i) Windows 2012 r2 Standard (GUI edition)
ii) SQL Server 2012 Standard

Then proceeded with the installation
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 r2 Install run-through-on-the-fly

System Center Configuration Manager 2012 r2 Lab Part 1 – Discovery

My travails through the discovery process – see windows-noob site for some excellent information relating to this and the other system center installation pieces involved.
System Center Configuration Manager 2012 r2 Lab Part 1 – Discovery

How to install System Center Configuration Manager 2012 r2 in a lab

In hopefully easy to follow steps 🙂 Enjoy!

Deploy to VHD server option in MDT 2013 – Could be just what we need when deploying PVS images!

Recently been working with MDT 2013 and getting to grips with it. As part of my day job have to look after 6 or so PVS farms (with over 20 different vDisks) so time-consuming in itself. One piece I have always liked to optimize has been integration with MDT. Have got to a “reasonable” point insofar as producing builds but over time with the day-to-day workload the MDT image and the vDisk image gradually “grow apart”.
One of the chief bug bears as been that the v-2-v conversion eg we are a vsphere shop so we do a MDT build we have to convert the image into the PVS Vhd format which is time-consuming and not all elegant. Till I’ve seen this option under the new MDT release – “deploy to vhd server task sequence” – certainly one i’ll be testing.

Will let you know my findings!

Windows 2008 r2 – no more service packs!

Wanted to check out end-of-life dates for windows 2008 r2 and came across the MS product lifecycle matrices:

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/search/default.aspx?sort=PN&alpha=windows+server+2008&Filter=FilterNO

What took my interest there was the service pack support date for r2. From what i see that means there is no more SP’s in the pipeline for 2008 r2. Interesting that with each releases the SP’s seem to diminish. Wasn’t long ago there was 6 for NT4, then 4 for 2000, 2 for 2003. Going along this pattern maybe none for 2012 r2? 🙂

SCCM 2012 SP1 + App-V 5.0 integration – still need Xenapp?

Interesting scenario we hit recently.
Internally we looked to leverage the Xenapp connector for SCCM 2012 and publishing apps via SCCM worked ok. Main pain point was the SCCM client working in the PVS environment – check out previous post on this.

Given our somewhat mixed experience with toyed with the idea of ditching targetting device collection groups and rather just target user collections, that way a user would automatically pick up their
application whether they used their corporate device or virtual desktop. So in essence split each application into 2 Deployment types

i) Target for corporate devices – in this case the deployment option was set to “download and install..” application
ii) Target for virtual desktops – stream to server

By doing it this way it helped “ring fence” the activity and provided the optimum user experience.
It did also come to beg the question – why use xenapp for apps used in this way? one question i will be coming back to

vSphere 5.1i virtual machine – wanna move it,its powered off and can’t – what gives?

Recently had an issue where i couldn’t migrate a powered off VM from one datastore to the other – the migrate option was grayed out (yep i could a scp but i was feeling lazy :)) – thing that tickled me was cloning the VM WOULD then provide an option to migrate the CLONED VM but not the original – turned out it the original VM wasnt happy with its registration in vCenter and removing/re-adding into the inventory fixed it – nice and easy does it 🙂
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2044369