Creating Active Directory Departmental Security Groups to Randomly Add Test Users with PowerShell

In the previous example, which you can find here, I shared how to very quicky create 77 Active Directory test users based on the names of United States presidents and vice presidents. See the post: Creating Active Directory Test User Accounts with PowerShell In this post, I'll build upon the test environment previously created, showing how to very quickly create 55 Active Directory Security Groups based on common Corporate department names. Then, I'll take the 77 Active Directory test users previously created, and populate each of the groups with a random selection of 15 members per group. You can take [...]

Creating Active Directory Test User Accounts with PowerShell

Ever wanted to create a number of Active Directory test user accounts, but didn't want to use incrementing accounts like Test01, Test02, Test03, etc.? I've often used United States presidents and vice presidents for my test accounts. The usernames are far more interesting that way! For anyone who would like to do the same, I've created a very simple PowerShell script, that simply needs two lines modified at the top, to be reusable for other environments. Once run against Active Directory, you'll have 77 accounts that can be nested into groups or used for various testing functions. Check it [...]

IGEL #DisruptNashville 2020 Session Recorded on Jan 29th! Lessons Learned from a 30K User Horizon RDSH and VDI Deployment

https://youtu.be/fngKVH8EN-U Taking the Plunge at Scale with VMware Horizon, NVIDIA and IGEL Very large environments are those that can gain the most value from a virtual app and desktop deployment, benefiting from simplified management, improving ROI, and enhancing end user compute security and compliance. But they can also be the most daunting to design and implement. What if your task was to design and implement a 30,000 user VMware Horizon Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH) and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment? Where would you start and how would you avoid common pitfalls and obstacles? In my upcoming DISRUPT 2020 Nashville [...]

Getting Started with NVIDIA Virtual GPU (vGPU) Software 8.0 for Citrix Hypervisor (XenServer) 8.0 with Windows Server 2019!

If you've been following my blog posts over the last couple weeks, you have probably seen two major products have released to web, one shortly after the other. Here are two of my more recent posts: NVIDIA Virtual GPU Software v8.0 Just Released! Now Supporting Windows 10 1809 and Windows Server 2019! - Dated April 16th, 2019 Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer) 8.0 Just Released! Now Supporting Windows Server 2019! - Dated April 25th, 2019 As you can see from the dates on these two blog posts, XenServer 8.0 was released within two weeks of NVIDIA vGPU Software v8.0. Many of us in the Citrix/NVIDIA community were left wondering if this [...]

What I Learned from CXD-252 Moving to the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Service with Microsoft Azure Course

It's not every day I get an opportunity to take an official in-person or virtual classroom lecture and lab course! It's quite easy to get busy working and consulting in the field with clients, that official classroom based training takes a backseat. So, when the opportunity arose to take a five-day online class and knock out a new requirement for my early days Citrix partnership, I was excited to see what new things I might learn. While this course is not brand new (it released in early 2018), it has been well updated and stays somewhat current with the changes [...]

My Presentation at the Inaugural Portland Citrix User Group Community (CUGC) Meetup – FSLogix, Windows 10 and Office 365!

Last Thursday on August 31st, I had the honor of presenting at the inaugural Portland Citrix User Group Community (CUGC) Meetup, representing FSLogix and talking about the pains of deploying Windows 10 and Office 365. I was joined by Andy Tynes, their VP of Worldwide Sales, who presented the company overview and first couple slides. Below you will find a copy of my slide presentation from this meetup. Looking forward to presenting at many more CUGC meetups in the coming months and years! Enjoy. FSLogix Presentation for Portland CUGC - AUGUST 2017 About Me… Dane Young, MBA daneyoung.com Twitter: @youngtech Virtualization Practice Manager [...]

My Pride. My Joy. Delivered as a Service. Introducing Entisys360 Workspace Cloud!

Over the last couple months, many of you have wondered, and some of you have asked, where I've been and what I've been up to. Long story short, I've been very busy and heads down working with our incredible team at Entisys360 to build a product we are publicly announcing to the market, called our Entisys360 Workspace Cloud offering! This is our latest development to enable Desktop Transformation, through a Digital Workspace for our valued clients. It goes beyond Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), and provides a fully integrated, fully managed, Workspace-as-a-Service environment for our mid-market and enterprise clients. This [...]

The $77 Compute Stick Endpoint for Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop and VMware Horizon Virtual Desktops, that Supports 4K Displays!

Over the holiday, I gifted a neat little compute stick for a family member, called an ASUS VivoStick PC (VS10). This gift was purchased as an inexpensive home theater PC, as it had Windows 10 and all the supported codecs for Audio/Video/Pictures and could run Plex Media Server. I originally had purchased a Roku 4 device to give, but in testing, I found out that it didn't support all of the video codecs that would be needed. So, I decided to throw in the towel and buy a full Windows PC for best long-term use, as that's what I've been [...]

NVIDIA GRID Days 2016 Recap, Key Takeaways, Technical Deep Dive and Lessons Learned!

Last week in Santa Clara, I was honored by NVIDIA to be one of thirteen professionals to join NVIDIA enterprise graphics teams for the first ever GRID Days event! GRID Days was a fun packed two day event networking with industry professionals, and getting an inside look into the NVIDIA enterprise graphics teams, namely GRID, Quadro, and Tesla. During this event we had exclusive access to the testing and development teams, product management and marketing, executive sponsors, along with management and support teams. Wow! Much of the roadmap and content required that all professionals sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), so [...]

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 [...]