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Deploying Windows 8 Virtual Desktop Infrastructure on Windows Server 2012

Several months ago, fellow blogger Kees Baggerman covered RDS: Windows 8 Scenario-based RDS deployment which included a 10 minute YouTube video on RDS Session Virtualization (aka terminal services). In this article, I am going to cover the other element of RDS scenario-based installation, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Microsoft VDI technologies have been around for several iterations of Hyper-V and Server 2008. With 2008 R2 SP1 Microsoft introduced RemoteFX, a promising technology for virtual desktop GPU acceleration. However, in the past there have been several challenges with deploying Microsoft VDI, namely the initial desktop provisioning and stateless pooling. With Server 2012, these [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|August 21st, 2012|Microsoft|87 Comments

Configuring Windows Server 8 Core with DHCP Failover and Replication!

In consulting with clients over the years for Virtualization, VDI and Cloud initiatives, an inevitable conversation that surfaces is DHCP high availability. While Microsoft allows Enterprise customers to protect DHCP in a Failover Cluster, my experience is that this option lacks mass adoption due to licensing requirements, increased complexity and an added dependency on the quorum storage (also a single point of failure). Another option involves an approach called DHCP split scope whereby two servers provide addresses for the same subnet, but do not overlap. This results in wasted address space, sometimes significant in the case of VDI with multiple [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|March 19th, 2012|Microsoft|0 Comments

Rapid Provisioning vSphere ESXi 5.0 Hosts Using Image Builder and Auto Deploy (Part 1)

If you haven’t heard or read some of the new capabilities in vSphere 5 around rapid provisioning hosts, allow me to introduce you to Auto Deploy (previously Fling). Auto Deploy is a PXE boot process that loads ESXi into memory thereby eliminating any need for local storage, even USB boot thumb drives. This capability is currently limited in that you may only have one Auto Deploy server per vCenter instance. This pretty much rules out the notion of load balancing the TFTP service, providing multiple image distribution points, or otherwise protecting Auto Deploy with methods other than VMware HA. However, [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|November 25th, 2011|VMware|3 Comments

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 [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|April 14th, 2011|Microsoft|1 Comment