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Upcoming EUC World: Independence Session, October 22 & 23, 2024! Automation Framework Windows Image Creation on Microsoft Azure for Citrix / AVD
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Upcoming EUC World: Independence Session, October 22 & 23, 2024! Automation Framework Windows Image Creation on Microsoft Azure for Citrix / AVD

Citrix, Microsoft

Upcoming EUC World: Independence Session, October 22 & 23, 2024! Automation Framework Windows Image Creation on Microsoft Azure for Citrix / AVD

The first inaugural EUC World: Independence conference is officially happening October 22nd and 23rd, 2024 in Silver Spring, Maryland! Keynote speakers will include Brian Madden, Shawn Bass, and Gabe Knuth. I’m pleased to announce I will have a technical presentation of the following topic: Automation Framework Windows Image Creation on Microsoft Azure for Citrix or Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) In this session, we’ll discuss Microsoft Azure as the platform to deliver automated Citrix Cloud DaaS images of Windows Operating Systems for app and desktop using PowerShell, Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, Pester, Azure Compute Galleries, and Citrix [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|August 26th, 2024|Citrix, Microsoft|0 Comments

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!
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!

Microsoft

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 [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|December 3rd, 2015|Microsoft|3 Comments

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

Microsoft

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 [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|November 30th, 2015|Microsoft|8 Comments

Hot off the Presses: Citrix Acquires Sanbolic, Creators of Melio FS. What’s Next?

The news is out! Citrix has acquired Boston based Software Defined Storage (SDS) company Sanbolic. Click here to read the full press release. Several months back Eva Helan (Co-founder, president and COO of Sanbolic) put me in touch and I had a call with fellow geek Andy Melmed (VP, Enterprise Architecture). Folks who have been in the Citrix space a while know Andy, but this was my first time chatting with him. Among other things, Andy told me a little bit about his history of working at Ardence (pre-Citrix acquisition) and later on the ISV certification team at Citrix (i.e. [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|January 12th, 2015|Citrix|2 Comments

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 [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|November 24th, 2014|Citrix, HPE, Microsoft|1 Comment

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 [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|November 24th, 2014|Citrix, HPE, Microsoft|2 Comments

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 [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|November 24th, 2014|Citrix, HPE, Microsoft|4 Comments

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, [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|February 10th, 2014|Microsoft|6 Comments

Deploying Generation 2 (Gen2) Virtual Machines from SCVMM 2012 R2 Templates Fails with Error (23352)

Trying to deploy Generation 2 (Gen2) Windows Server 2012 R2 Virtual Machines from System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) templates over the weekend, I found consistent failures with Error (23352): Error (23352) VMM cannot find the device or this device is not valid for a boot device. Recommended Action Make sure you specify a valid device as a boot device. On the Details tab, the deployment task fails at "Change properties of virtual machine." Digging a bit on the web, I found these symptoms matched the following TechNet forum thread: Cannot create VM from Gen2 template The resolution to the [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|December 14th, 2013|Microsoft|0 Comments

Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V MDT 2013 Deployment Comparing Gen1 to Gen2 Legacy/Synthetic Network Boot

Having fun on a Saturday, recorded this nice benchmark showing the improvements booting from the network between Hyper-V Gen1 VMs w/Legacy vs. Gen2 VMs w/Synthetic. For more details, check out Aidan's blog (http://www.aidanfinn.com/?p=14913) or Technet for more details on Gen2 VMs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvGcp7ZRSxw&amp;feature=youtu.be The Gen1 w/Legacy took about 11 minutes end to end while the Gen2 w/Synthetic finished in about 8 minutes. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or just want to leave feedback, please do so below. Thanks for reading! @youngtech

By Dane Young, MBA|November 9th, 2013|Microsoft|0 Comments