Virtually Jason

I've been working with PowerShell a lot recently and stumbled a little bit with String Manipulation.  So, I've decided to post some details of what I've learned, to hopefully help others avoid my mistakes. String manipulation can be very important when scripting, especially if the purpose of the script is to output a human readable report.  First, there's a great TechNet article on string manipulation in PowerShell .  It covers the basics in great detail; my intent is to supplement that article with some of the pain points that I came across while using those techniques. How to Trim a String Trimming a string simply means removing characters from the ends of that string.   There are 3 Trim commands: .Trim() .TrimStart() and .TrimEnd().  As the names imply, TrimStart() removes characters from the start of a string, TrimEnd() removes characters from the end of a string, and Trim() removes characters from both ends of the string.  Those Trim commands ar...

I've done some work lately to improve my desktop restart script from earlier in the month. I've made a few important changes - now the script will wait (by default 10 seconds) between restart commands so as to not overwhelm the environment. That wait time is a configurable parameter; just invoke the script with the -wait # option to set it to wait for that number of seconds. This is especially useful for nonpersistent pools, as you can pass it a highish number (such as 45 seconds) in order to ensure that the bulk of the desktops in a floating pool remain available at any one time. I've also improved the script's session handling logic. It will now restart systems with Disconnected sessions (but will still not restart desktops with Connected sessions). It is also no longer sensitive to the domain suffix of the desktops. Finally, I found a condition where it would fail to issue a hard reset for a frozen desktop, if that desktop was so frozen that the VMTools compl...

Quite a few of my customers use Firefox as their web browser.  In a VDI environment, it becomes important to customize Firefox's behavior in order to comply with corporate standards.  There's an enterprise version of Firefox , but if you're not inclined to go that route, VDI solutions make it very easy to push enterprise configurations to all of the endpoints that are using Firefox. Firefox is great because it uses config files for just about everything.  Through those files, you can make all of the commonly required configurations.  You can disable automatic updates for Firefox.  You can set a default home page (and enforce it so that the user can't change it).  You can disable the first run "Import Settings" wizard and "welcome to firefox" page.  You can disable the default browser check.  Basically, you have full control over how Firefox works and what its settings are. There are 3 files that you'll need to create: C:\Program Files (x86)\M...

One of the biggest challenges associated with VDI is supporting applications.  In the server world, we've pretty thoroughly moved to a "one application per server" mentality, so application conflicts don't really happen.  If there's a problem, it's immediately obvious which application is involved.  In general, it makes management much easier. Desktops, of course, are in the far opposite situation.  We shove as many applications into a desktop as the user needs.  This means that, when there is an issue, it can be very difficult to diagnose which application is misbehaving.  I've recently been helping a customer who has been suffering from random disconnects in their VDI environment.  The View Administrator shows the desktops with a status of either "Invalid IP" or "Agent Unreachable" and the Agent logs on the desktop haven't been particularly helpful. Eventually, we installed Liquidware Labs Stratusphere on the desktops, in orde...