The core of any VDI deployment is the Virtual Desktop Template (VDT) which is the blueprint from which all the virtual desktop VMs are created. It occurred to me that there must be a way to create and maintain this using the deployment tools used to create real desktops rather than the way I hack… Read more
I realised I need to recreate a Domain Controller in my labs and in so doing I noticed a snag in my earlier scripts that really breaks when I use the same snippet for a new DC. I have this test to see if a VM is ready to be used.. do {Start-sleep –seconds 10}… Read more
My laptop running Windows Server 2012R2 looks like this when it starts: This is a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing if: You have a server you want to connect to from a device with touch on that may have a smaller form factor and you have big fingers so you… Read more
In my last post I showed how to build a simple cluster out of two VMs and a shared disk. The VMs are nodes in this cluster.. and the shared “quorum” disk is used to mediate which node owns the cluster when a connection is lost between them.. However this cluster is not actually doing… Read more
For many of us Failover Clustering in Windows still seems to be a black art, so I thought it might be good to show how to do some of the basics in a lab and show off a few of the new clustering features of Windows server 2012 R2 in the process. Firstly what is… Read more
If you have been to one of our IT camps you’ll know it’s all live and unstructured which can mean things can go wrong, typically because we didn’t tidy up properly after the previous event. The problems of repeatedly creating VMs are that: The VM still exists in Hyper-V The files making up the VM… Read more
I have just got back to my blog after a few days at various events and I see the Evaluation edition of Windows Server 2012R2 has been released. I need this for my lab ops because I am building and blowing away VMs for er… evaluations and I don’t want to have to muck about… Read more
In Windows Server you can create two kinds of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), personal or pooled. A personal collection is a bit like a company car scheme where everyone chooses their own car. This means there needs to be car for everyone even if they are on leave or sick etc. and each car needs… Read more
VDI bridges the world of the client and the server, and that can mean that in a world where IT professionals are either experts in one or the other (Simon and I being a case in point), most of us have a partial knowledge of how VDI works. There are other reasons why you might… Read more
In my last post I had a section in my script to create access right to a share I had just created and as promised I wanted to dissect that a bit more. To recap what I wanted to do was to create a share with sufficient privileges to use that share for storing VMs… Read more