Distributed File System Archives

Provisioning Services Shared Volumes Using Read-Only Managed Stores

When discussing options for vDisk storage placement and provisioning services there are two primary options: Block-based attached storage (Locally attached, iSCSI, FC, FCoE) and network attached storage (CIFS or NFS). One of the best resources to understand the advantages of Block-Based attached storage and NTFS file caching is the Advanced Memory and Storage Considerations for Provisioning Services document. After understanding the concepts in this document any Citrix engineer would choose block-based over network storage any day of the week! If you’ve made the mistake I made this would result in local storage for each Provisioning Server in a site and manual [...]

Windows 2008 Server Core: My First Choice for Role-Based Infrastructure Services

If you haven’t evaluated Windows 2008 Server Core, now’s the time! Server Core is the ultimate choice for infrastructure services that are role based, utilizing any of the following: Active Directory (Including LDS and Certificate Services), DNS, DHCP, File Services (Including Distributed File System Replication), Hyper-V (Although I would utilize the Hyper-V installer), Print Services, Streaming Media Services and IIS. One of the benefits of Server Core is security by default. Server Core was designed to be a stripped down role-based Operating System with a dramatically minimized security footprint. In addition, Server Core reduces maintenance, management, and storage footprint, ultimately [...]