Virtually Jason

I’ll say it again – I’m not an Active Directory guy. That said, my customer had me out to implement a VDI solution for them and, as we all know, that’s highly dependent on Active Directory (at least, if you’re using Windows desktops). This particular customer didn’t have any printer deployment solution in place; instead they sent out a member of their IT team to configure each user’s printers manually. Needless to say, that printer solution doesn’t scale very well into a Nonpersistent Floating desktop pool scenario, and just as obviously, it fell upon me to guide them to a better solution. This customer is using Windows 2008 R2 print servers and has Windows 2008 Domain Controllers. There’s some pretty cool GPO based printer deployment solutions in this version of windows, so the first solution that I attempted was to just use Active Directory to deploy printers when people log in. I was able to get this working without too much difficulty, but in the Floating environment, it a...

IOPS – Input/Output Operations Per Second – is a key factor when designing a View solution (more important than storage space even, given the various tools that deal with storage consolidation). That’s old news. What I’ve been having fun doing recently is trying to determine just what kind of IO I can expect from the various LUNs that have been carved from my SAN. I’m using pretty standard techniques here that would work for any server analysis, however I’m applying them to my virtual desktops in order to ensure that my storage can support the number of desktops that I plan to load up. We’ve probably all seen tables that reveal per disk information in a table like this (taken from Wikipedia): Device Type IOPS Interface Notes 7,200 rpm SATA drives HDD ~75-100 IOPS [2] SATA 3 Gb/s 10,000 rpm SATA drives HDD ~125-150 IOPS [2] SATA 3 Gb/s ...