Tag Archives: Microsoft

CPU scheduling and memory optimizations solutions compared Part 1 of 2 CPU

  By Barry Schiffer | November 22, 2012 - 17:08 | , , , , , ,
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For a while now customers and colleagues are asking me which tool to use when it comes to CPU scheduling and memory optimizations. We use several management products and end up with more than one product utilizing these tasks. Choice is good but do we just enable them all and if not what’s the best way to configure this?

When you look a little bit deeper then plain and simple marketing you’ll notice that the way the different products handle CPU scheduling is totally different and combining some of them will degrade system performance or simply don’t work for example Citrix CPU management does not start when Microsoft DFSS is enabled.

Before we start I’d like to thank Andrew Morgan for allowing me to re-use some information from his ThreadLocker topic.

To start off I will first try to explain how each product works and will then summarize and see if we can work through them and work to a proper advice.

Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 Dynamic Fair Share Scheduling (DFSS)

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Windows server 2012 experiences – Part 1 Server Manager

  By Barry Schiffer | March 8, 2012 - 08:57 |
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With the release of Windows Server 2012 beta it’s time to look at new and improved features that are interesting where I am focused on the VDI / RDS world. In this blog series I will try to point out what’s new and why it’s cool or … npt.

The first thing we need to do to get to a point where we can actually do something is to install roles and features. This is a complete different experience to what we have seen in earlier versions.

When you log on to the Windows Server 2012 the Server Manager is started, this behavior did not change but the difference is that it’s now a very usable tool.

In the left picture below you can see the startup screen of the server manager, as you can see I already installed some features. In the picture on the right you can see the local server information, this is where you can configure the server name, IE security, Windows updates etc etc.

Screen Shot 2012-03-08 at 09.16.33Screen Shot 2012-03-08 at 09.19.32

 

 

 

 

 

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Hyper-V 2012 –Change is good!

  By Barry Schiffer | February 22, 2012 - 22:13 |
3 Comments

On my first blog post about Hyper-V R2 which you can find here I received a lot of reactions and I always appreciate it to get any type of response (except the 380 spam comments per day). Most of the people agree with the statements and some don’t. I’d like to start this article with stating that it was not my intention to bash Hyper-V as a product, I really think Hyper-V is a great hypervisor, it’s the management what is creating the issues.

So now with the upcoming version of Hyper-V 2012, which will be released as a beta version on the 29th, I’d like to look at what’s changing in regard to my earlier article. Of course the complete hypervisor management architecture consist of Hyper-V and SCVMM 2012.

The focus of this article is (again) mainly on what it means for VDI scenarios however I think that most of the conclusions will go for whatever scenario.

So what’s new in Server 8, Hyper-V and SCVMM 2012 and why does it matter!

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Hyper-V R2 for VDI? Think again!

  By Barry Schiffer | February 21, 2012 - 14:19 |
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The reason for this article is to explain why I don’t like Hyper-V R2 in a production scenario especially for VDI. In a next article I will go into detail about why I think Hyper-V v3 is likely and hopefully going to proof me wrong!

The people I work with closely know I tend to hate Hyper-V R2 for production (VDI) scenario’s and I will start with explaining why. The short version is that you need to many components to manage the hypervisor which leads to technical issues.

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Powershell Microsoft Active Directory full script

  By Barry Schiffer | April 10, 2009 - 10:33 | ,
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image To finish the Powershell Microsoft Active Directory blog post series here is a script which I used for a customer. The script is used for moving the Terminal Server Home Drives of all TS users to a Central Directory. The central directory is based on the ServernameShare%USERNAME% value. The TS Home Drive location was set manually and different location were used. We needed to change this to one single location. Doing this manually would take us months so we need to automate these tasks.

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Powershell App-V Script – Add applications by using manifest.xml

  By Barry Schiffer | April 10, 2009 - 10:32 | , ,
6 Comments

appvWith the introduction of Microsoft App-V v4.5 Microsoft introduced the manifest.xml file. To read more about the manifest file please read this blog post by Rodney Medina MVP on App-V and owner of Softrgidblog.com.

The PowerShell App-V script I will show you today will perform two actions. One is adding the Virtual Application to the App-V client by using the manifest file and the second is performing a full load of the added Virtual Applications.

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