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...

I was performing a late night p2v of a Windows 2008 server the other night and I ran into an issue that I figured I’d share. This server was initially installed with the help of Dell’s server utility, and as such the first partition on the drive was one of those small utility partitions. Standard practice during a p2v is to leave those partitions behind. Since the server’s not on Dell hardware any more, Dell’s utilities aren’t going to serve a purpose. Most of my experience with p2v is with Server 2000 and Server 2003 (and in fact, I’ve done more NT than 2008 at this point), and with 2003 I’ve seen those partitions cause more harm than good. We moved forward with the cookie cutter p2v of the server and the first anomaly was the fact that the utility partition was the Active partition (as opposed to the C: partition with Windows installed). Given that Converter doesn’t give you the option to leave behind an active partition any more (and I do miss that option), we decided to forge a...