Varrow Blogs

VMware/Microsoft doesn’t support third-party multipathing or the Round Robin path policy for VMs setup in a Microsoft Failover Cluster. This fact is stated in the “Setup for Failover Clustering and Microsoft Cluster Service” PDF on pages 11, 25 and 36 http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40_u1/vsp_40_u1_mscs.pdf The reason why this isn’t supported is due to the way the SCSI-3 command [...]

In Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7, Microsoft has disabled the Copy To.. button on the User Profiles screen. This process has been used for years to create a custom default user profiles and now they go and break that with no real workaround. They want people to move to Windows 2008 and Windows 7 [...]

Well, well, well…. I wrote the other day that Microsoft was making some drivers available to the Linux kernel under the GPL license. Many people were surprised but it really came down to functionality with Hyper-V. Turns out, there is a little more to the story as reported here.  The problem is [...]

Microsoft surprised some people today with the announcement that they are contributing some drivers to the Linux kernel project.  There is a lot of mis-information and confusion running around..look no further than Slashdot!  Some things just never change….  Anyway, the purpose of Microsoft’s contribution is simple, better support for Hyper-V.  By adding these kernel extensions [...]

I was showing a client the “Exchange Tasks 2007″ tool from U-BTech website yesterday and noticed some new free tools for Exchange 2007 and Windows 2008.

Certificate Manager for Exchange 2007 -Exchange 2007 enables SSL within IIS by default. Using PowerShell commands, certificate creation and management is quite confusing and often results with incorrect results due [...]

As a follow-up to my last post around the Windows 2003 TS / Citrix XenApp comparison I thought I’d create a high level summary of some of the changes made to Windows Server 2008 Terminal Server.  Most of this is summarized from a recent Citrix document that is very informative.  In general, most of the [...]

The partitioning alignment “bug” in Windows 2003 and earlier has been fixed in Windows 2008.
You no longer have to use diskpart.exe to align new partitions in Windows 2008.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb738145.aspx
http://theessentialexchange.com/blogs/michael/archive/2008/03/07/Exchange-2007-Disk-Performance-Partition-Alignment-.aspx
Posted in EMC, Microsoft, windows2008 Tagged: EMC, Microsoft, windows2008

After my last blog entry regarding Microsoft VECD licensing it appears I was still confused.  Here is the way VECD licensing works (really this time).
 
 
 
 

The Clients:
-          Licensing must be purchased through the Microsoft Open Value Program which is a 3yr subscription
-          For desktop/laptop Clients the OS must be upgraded to Software Assurance licensing for Vista
o   [...]

Understanding Microsoft Licensing for VDI Environments (i.e. VECD)
When it comes to the topic of virtualization, VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) has been one of the fastest growing areas.  The ability to virtualize your desktops and then manage and store those images back in the datacenter offers many advantages over standard thick-client computing.  By creating one “golden [...]

Check out my updated User Profiles Best Practices White Paper.
http://www.varrow.com/index.php?id=98

Posted in Citrix, Microsoft, windows2008, xenapp, xendesktop Tagged: Citrix, Microsoft, xenapp

Some of you may have already known about the mandatory profile change in Windows 2008 but I had no idea. I recently did my first Citrix XenApp 5 - Windows 2008 project and had a hard time getting the mandatory profile working.
After some searching I found that the mandatory profile folder name has to have [...]

I recently started working with Windows 2008 and decided to build a Windows 2008 VMware ESX template to use to roll out Windows 2008 Servers.
I first upgraded my Virtual Center to 2.5 Update 3 and then updated my host to 3.5 Update 2 and all post update 2 patches. I did these updates because my [...]