“…Your present circumstances don't determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start…” Nido Qubein. Yes, this is one of those emails. I honestly never thought I’d ever leave but here it is… ...

Aussie legend Cameron McBride and good friend Tony Sanchez from Citrix sent a heads up to me recently on some performance related hotfixes. They are specific to proc and SP1. Nevertheless they are definitely worth applying for the best performance. ...

Ive recently been building out some awesome Microsoft and Citrix demos for our internal field organization running the full stack of XenDesktop 5, XenApp6, Hyper-V, App-V 4.6 and AppSense. Ive been having these weird problems with App-V and the App-V...

Right now Im preparing for Microsoft Management Summit next week in Las Vegas. Sure it will be a tough time being in Vegas again with lots of hard work (and play) and another keynote appearance :) Anyhow, Im also preparing one of the booth demos. This...

Hot off the press, Windows MultiPoint Server 2011 today released and is now live on the Microsoft download center for evaluation. This is an exciting new release that delivers some fantastic new features such as: Desktop Thumbnails – Through...

I love Friday news. Its even better when I get to announce something that others havent done yet! Cisco has recently wrapped up testing with their UCS platform using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Citrix XenDesktop 4 on top of NetApp SANs...

From the desk of Vishwa Kumbalimutt: We’re pleased to announce RTW of SCVMM RDV plug-in that enables dynamic placement of VDI VMs for both personal and pooled VMs . The key benefit of using this plug-in is that it reduces the number of Hyper...

Awesome news, hot off the press. We have just completed a new round of testing for Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 with Hyper-V and Dynamic Memory. What showed was that Hyper-V SP1 could scale a lot more with Windows 7 SP1 than we were actually supporting...

Anthony Borton isn’t going to like this review. You see a couple of weeks ago, while all us Microsofties were at our semi-annual conference, Anthony was working on the Hand on Labs. He even brought his wife over for the experience. So when Jeff Alexander...

A new whitepaper has released that discusses the pro's and cons of VDI vs Session Virtualization along with when to use what. Its something that reinforces the discussion points I raised in a previous post about session virtualization being cheaper for...

The RD Virtualization Host Capacity Planning in Windows Server 2008 R2 (Link to paper on Download Center – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=bd24503e-b8b7-4b5b-9a86-af03ac5332c8 ) , is now live on the Download...

Just a heads up that the issue around Event ID 17 being logged in the System log on a TS Licensing server has now been updated with a hotfix. Please refer to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/983385/ for updated guidance though heres the synopsis from the...

A friend of mine and I were talking today about TechED USA and all the questions we had around virtualization. He commented that he even had one person come up and talk to him about Disk Virtualization, which refers to “Boot from VHD”. Well...

Oh my goodness! The same author, Martin McClean, that produced the Windows Server 2008 R2 Feature Component poster  has done it again producing an awesome new poster that highlights the components of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. In his words:...

In other news today, we just released to the download center an updated whitepaper that reflects the changes in App-V 4.6 to support Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2008 R2 namely support for 64 bit! Enjoy! http://download.microsoft.com...

This came in my email yesterday and is very welcome news for people wanting to configure VDI and RDS in Windows Server 2008 R2: “…The Remote Desktop Services Deployment Guide for Windows Server 2008 R2 , is now live on the Download Center...

Interesting new performance article released from Intel. Covers the choice around VHD and streaming OS deployment on Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. When you think of streaming the OS on to Hyper-V, think how Citrix’s Provisioning Server does it. It also again...

Right now we’re thinking about our plans for the next financial year, and where we need to focus our efforts to help you succeed. We are thinking about how we deliver you the best solution content in terms of documentation, architectures and even webcasts...

For those of you interested in attending, details are here: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032447903&Culture=en-US TechNet Webcast: Capacity Planning and Sizing for Session Virtualization and VDI with RDS (Level...

In a previous post I linked to a TechNet article that documented the custom settings for the RDP file. In a true case of “wait there’s more!” I have more to show that were not documented here , though will be soon. In the meantime though: allow font smoothing...

Often you'll want to change certain settings in your RDP files, or during configuration of RemoteApp, VDI or otherwise. I just noticed that finally the RDP Custom Settings reference has released at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff393699(WS...

Very interesting article by Citrix's Simon Crosby today. Citrix have done some VDI workload density analysis and found an interesting result that Hyper-V 2008 R2 is outperforming Xenserver for Windows 7 workloads. Wheres VMware in this? Who knows. They...

As I mentioned earlier in the day, today we discussed two new features for Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 which are Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX. The on demand webcast has just been posted live and has demos of both of these. While it would be great for...

As per the press pass announcement today at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/mar10/03-18desktopvirtpr.mspx we will be talking about new investments in VDI and Desktop Virtualization at the Desktop Virtualization Hour Webcast . Ill be presenting...

Tomorrow (US PST time) March 18th at 9am we are doing a one hour virtualization discussion - where we will be talking about some stuff youve heard about and stuff you definitely havent heard about or seen either. As part of that we will be talking about...