Free MDT Tools and PowerShell Scripts to Fully Automate the Deployment and Configuration of Hyper-V Server 2016, Failover Clustering, and Storage Spaces Direct for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure!

In the previous blog post I demonstrated how to build a proof of concept environment using Windows Server 2016 with Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct using virtual machines on VMware vSphere. Expanding on the concepts that I covered in the previous post, I'm going to show you how to fully automate the installation and configuration process using Microsoft's free hypervisor and deployment software, namely Hyper-V Server 2016 and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013 Update 1. If you follow the steps in this post, at the end you will have a fully automated, entirely free Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform including shared storage [...]

Introduction and Evaluation of Windows Server 2016 TP4 Hyper-V using Storage Spaces Direct for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

This is a two part series. To read the second post, click here. A couple years ago Microsoft released a new feature in Windows Server called Storage Spaces. From the customers that I work with, the feature has not been widely adopted, but has attracted much interest from Microsoft shops, particularly those looking to leverage for Hyper-V SMB storage or for scale-out private clouds. I suspect this is mostly due to one of the original limitations of Storage Spaces, requiring all hosts in the cluster to see the local storage, either directly or through JBOD SAS expanders, which are not [...]

Deploying Windows 10 Virtual Desktop Infrastructure on Windows Server 2016 (Technical Preview)

Three years back I wrote a blog post on Deploying Windows 8 Virtual Desktop Infrastructure on Windows Server 2012 that has been wildly popular and received lots of blog comments. With the release of Windows 10 anticipated within the next month, I felt it would be appropriate to do an update to this blog post. This time, I will show how to deploy Windows 10, using NVIDIA GRID K1 graphics cards, RemoteFX, and Windows Server 2016 (not the official name, still being called 'Technical Preview 2'). The Windows Server 2016 host is an HP DL380 Gen8 server with two GRID [...]

Citrix WorkspacePod, an HP Moonshot Architect’s Perspective

TLDR: Citrix WorkspacePod summarized in one word: Bundling. For about the last year and a half, I have been affectionately called Mr. Moonshot among my peers and colleagues.  Thanks everyone, you're too kind! Naturally, at Citrix Summit when one of the big keynote announcements on WorkspacePod surfaced, I started getting a lot of questions. I'm no expert on DataON, so I can't comment on that particular piece. For all I knew, DataON was a commodity/whitebox storage company, and have never even really looked into their Cluster-in-a-Box (CiB) product family. Who knew! Enough about DataON, that's not the focus of this [...]

Using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013 to Deploy Windows 7 XenDesktop Master to HP Moonshot (m700, m710) Part 1

Last week I was at the Citrix Technology Professionals (CTP) meetup at Citrix’s Santa Clara office and was having a discussion about Moonshot with Aaron Parker. Aaron is commonly regarded as the master of App-V and MDT, so naturally he was curious to see if I had yet used MDT to deploy the Windows Operating Systems to HP Moonshot. If you’ve not had a change to see Aaron present this content, I highly recommend you watch his Synergy/E2E session or review his content on ‘Hands off my gold image!’ MDT in fact is what I use for all my EUC [...]

Using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013 to Deploy Windows 7 XenDesktop Master to HP Moonshot (m700, m710) Part 2

Back to Part 1: Overview and Windows 7 Image Customization Creating an MDT Application to Install AMD Catalyst Control Center Next, let’s create an application package to install the AMD Catalyst Control Center. To do this, we need to download the latest from http://www.hp.com/support/moonshot/1500chassis-software-download: Run the .exe to extract to a directory (cancel installation after extraction). For my environment, I’ll use ‘C:\imageprep\14.301.1001-140915a-176768C-HP-WHQL’ this is just a temporary directory that we’ll import into MDT: In the MDT console, right click Applications and click New Application: Select Application with Source Files: Type AMD for the Publisher and Catalyst Control Center for the [...]

Using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013 to Deploy Windows 7 XenDesktop Master to HP Moonshot (m700, m710) Part 3

Back to Part 2: Creating MDT Applications and the Moonshot Task Sequence Installing and Configuring Windows Deployment Services for Unattended PXE Now for a little piece that I didn’t previously document in my MDT posts…Configuring Windows Deployment Services. Seeing that Moonshot nodes don’t have physical or virtual optical drives, we need PXE boot to get the devices on the network and connected to MDT to install the image.  This process is actually pretty straight forward, let’s get started… Open Server Manager and click Manage in the top right, then Add Roles and Features: Click Next, Next, Next. Under the Server Roles [...]

Rapid Provisioning Bulk Virtual Machines using SCVMM and Hyper-V; Creating Full Clones for XenDesktop or Microsoft VDI

Over the last several years I've written a number of PowerShell scripts, ranging in complexity from one-liners to very complex multi-function modular packages for distribution (See the Citrix Chained Reboot Scripts for XenApp and XenDesktop for an example of one of my more complex scripts).  As I've discovered, scripting in PowerShell is an adaptive process, easily allowing you to take bits and pieces from a previous script to feed into the next. Well, that's just what I've done with this SCVMM/Hyper-V script to create Full VM Clones for Citrix XenDesktop or Microsoft VDI. See below for a demo of the [...]

NVIDIA GRID Free Test Drive Hosted on Amazon AWS! GPU Tech Conference (GTC) 2014

After an amazing and full-filled week with many colleagues at NVIDIA's GPU Tech Conference (GTC) 2014, I received an e-mail inviting me to try the new 24 hour limited time GRID trial, hosted on Amazon AWS!  I decided it would be good to capture a quick video of my experience poking around, to eliminate all doubt that NVIDIA GRID can deliver a rich user experience, even from the public cloud.  Check out the video that I recorded below: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Smjgn38oZMo&feature=youtu.be While this video is a bit long, I wanted to cover a couple of the different applications that NVIDIA has pre-loaded [...]

Rapid Provisioning Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter Hyper-V hosts using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) – Part 1

Don't miss the YouTube video with the results at the bottom! Over the last several years, I've been deploying a LOT of Hyper-V. As a long-time VMware fan, I have to admit, System Center and Hyper-V are sorely lacking in my opinion when it comes to Host Profiles. After all, VMware makes it so easy to deploy with a common set of standard configurations. You drop the installer in, answer a couple easy questions, and within 15 minutes, you typically have a host that has the basic configuration. Then, you can simply attach it to your existing VMware vCenter server, [...]