group policy

ControlUp – Terminal Server and VDI Management

My favorite IT management console is just released in version 2.0 with a great bunch of new features and enhancements. This is a sponsored review, but I love this product and have been using it at all my customer since the first release.

In this blog post I’ll cover what’s new in this release. I’m also going to host a webinar with the CTO of ControlUp Tuesday, February 26, 2013 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM IST with live demo and Q&A. Make sure to reserve your spot HERE.

Central Configuration:

In earlier versions of ControlUp you needed to create the configuration on each and every management computer. Now the configuration can be stored in the cloud secured by your own encryption key. This way all the users of ControlUp can share the organizations computer tree, delegate administrative task and permissions (similar to AppCenter) and receive alerts on performance bottlenecks. The alerts is at the moment just sent to the event viewer, but I was told that an SMS / SMTP solution will be available in the next release.

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Configure an Authoritative Time Server with Group Policy

An Authoritative Time Server is a must in every environment. This is one of topics covered by CTP Carl Webster in the presentation “10 things in AD that can hurt XenDesktop or XenApp and how to fix them“. Make sure you clear a half day and go through the presentation and your Active Directory to make sure it’s as healthy as possible.

Setting up an Authoritative Time Server is easy, but doing it incorrectly will get you into trouble. The same could happen if you move your PDC emulator role to another domain controller and forget to reconfigure an Authoritative Time Server.

So in this post I’ll show you how to configure an Authoritative Time Server Group Policy and using WMI filtering to apply it to the Primary Domain Controller only.

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Why You Shouldn’t Redirect Favorites to Home Folder

During Citrix Synergy 2012 in San Francisco it was argued numerous times by Shawn Bass that redirecting Favorites to the home folder is a very bad idea. Shawn mentioned that Internet Explorer causes an extensive number of calls on your file server when browsing so I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into this topic.

Folder redirection to home folder is the rule of thumb to improve logon speed and create a better user experience across platforms. That being said, redirecting AppData should be avoided at all costs.

To redirect or not is a sensible topic and I think it would be a great Geek Speak Session with CTP Shawn Bass and Aaron Parker vs Citrix Consulting Services.

What happens under the hood :

To illustrate this I’ve been using Internet Explorer 9 and Process Monitor on my Windows 7 laptop. The filter beeing used is Path IS C:\Users\Administrator\Favorites.

When opening Internet Explorer you’ll see 13 calls in Process Monitor.

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Pin Icons to Start Menu for All Users with GPO

Pinning and unpinning icons to the Start Menu or Taskbar can be a pain on Windows 2008 or Windows 7. After doing some research I came up with an how to that I wanted to share with you today.

The first problem I got was that the Pin to Taskbar / Start Menu was missing from the menu.

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Citrix XenDesktop 5 using Hyper-V and SCVMM

In this video tutorial I’ll show you how to install and configure Citrix XenDesktop 5 (XD5) with Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). The process is pretty straight forward if you do them in the right order.

I’m installing SCVMM on the same server as XD5 which means you’ll need to install XD5 first to get the latest versio of Microsoft SQL Express. Always remember to install the SCVMM Admin Console on the server(s) hosting XD5.

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