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 [...]

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 [...]

Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop 7.11 Proof of Concept Installation and Configuration using Windows Server 2016 and NVIDIA GRID K2 GPU Cards!

During Microsoft Ignite this week in Atlanta, Georgia, Microsoft announced the launch of Windows Server 2016 with volume licensing versions being available for download mid-October. This was a bit disappointing, as I was hoping to have final Windows Server 2016 ISOs available this week in the Volume License Service Center and MSDN libraries. Oh well, looks like we'll have to wait another couple weeks…While the full licensed products are not quite available, Microsoft did release Windows Server 2016 Evaluation. You'll note, this build is no longer considered Tech Preview, so it should be fairly close to the GA which will be released [...]

Installation and Configuration of VMware Horizon 7 for NVIDIA GRID and Blast Extreme!

Yesterday VMware released to web Horizon 7, which will likely be the most significant product launch for their End User Computing portfolio this year. Along with Horizon 7 come a number of very exciting new features that have been outlined in great detail in the following blogs: What's New With VMware Horizon 7 Introducing True SSO (Single Sign-On) in VMware Horizon 7 Network Ports Diagram Updated for Horizon 7 Taking a Closer Look at Horizon 7: Desktop & App Virtualization Reimagined VMware Horizon Blast Extreme Acceleration with NVIDIA GRID VMware Instant Clone Technology for Just-In-Time Desktop Delivery in Horizon 7 [...]

Installation and Configuration of Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop 7.8 AppDisks and AppDNA for a Basic Proof of Concept

I am really excited to see Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.8 has released to web! With this release, there are too many exciting new features to detail out here, instead just take a look at my buddy Thomas Poppelgaard's detailed list here. I've summarized some of the components I'm most excited about below… What's New in 7.8 (More details…): AppDisks has finally shipped!  Woohoo!! Full integration in Studio for AppDNA and AppDisks.  More details… Enhanced support for Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V)! Now there is no longer a dependency on the management and publishing servers in studio. Simply point Studio to [...]

Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) 7.6 vs. 7.7, VHD vs. VHDX and Scale-Out File Server Update

A couple years ago I was troubleshooting through a Versioning and Merge VHD issue with Provisioning Services (PVS) 7.1 and Windows Scale-Out File Server (SOFS), which resulted in my recommendation to create a Maintenance store for vDisk Versioning. I am happy to see in the last two years this has completely improved and dare I say is fully resolved, specifically with the recent release of PVS 7.7. In this blog post, I'm going to share a little bit of testing data from my experience with PVS 7.7, along with a couple recommendations. Let's get started! A couple notes about PVS [...]

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 [...]

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