Whitepapers
VDI – Automating Windows Install
I was going to write a book on VDI at one point but myself and the other co-authors got overwhelmed with work so it’s come to a standstill. So I decided to blog some of my material and one of the sections I wrote was demonstrating how to automate windows installation.
First of all let’s not get this confused with automating the deployment of VDI desktops, you should use virtual machine templates to do that. But to create a template in the first place you need to prepare an operating system. I can show you how to reduce the time needed to perform this task if it’s something that is repeated often.
Click Here > Automate Windows Installs (3409 downloads)
VDM & Computers OU addition.
This week we picked up on a potential problem with VDM creating new VMs in AD and placing them in the Computers OU which meant without third party intervention we would have to create a GPO on that OU which is messy, well I have a solution. You can use standard sysprep inf files as customisation specs in VC…Please review this document from Chris Skinner.
http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1103;jsessionid=200BB1A6EE670CF58FD70172528BB5D4
Running XenApp in a ESX VM
Back in 2006 I wrote whitepaper outlining my thoughts about running Citrix XenApp virtualised in a ESX VM. The information is probably still relevant so if you want to read it Click Here > Running XenAPP in vSphere (6604 downloads)
Recently I had a conversation with someone from VMware and we agreed that: there’s no need to remove vmmemctl, as installing it will not have any negative impact on the VMs by itself. Even if you do not plan to over-provision your ESX hosts in terms of memory, it is in your best interest to have the Balloon Driver as an insurance should memory pressure increase (i.e. because of a host failure and HA restarting VMs on the remaining hosts). If vmmemctl is not installed, ESX will have no other way than to reclaim memory by swapping out Virtual Machine memory, which will be a more severe performance impact. Here a somewhat recent post by Scott Drummonds on that topic: http://vpivot.com/2009/09/25/esx-memory-management-ballooning-rules/”
