Martin Zugec
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XenCenter plugins v2
Not a long time ago, I wrote about XenCenter and ability to extend the console using plugins. The goal of this blog post was to show that XenServer GUI is actually quite flexible and if you’re missing some functionality, you can easily add it. I love the principle of extensible GUI and I think that every product should support it. Ability to write the scripts and ...
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How to put XenApp servers to maintenance mode
Introduction “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” - Bill Gates Many people know that I am a big supporter of laziness in IT (and I wrote about it before, too). Lazy approach is actually very hard – it requires a lot of effort to learn how to minimize the amount of work ...
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PVS Internals 1 – cache manager
Before reading this article, you definitely want to check out the amazing whitepaper from Dan Allen called Advanced Memory and Storage Considerations for Provisioning Services. I’m not going to explain the basics here, so I recommend you do your homework first. I’m going to write a follow up blog post later on. This first part will focus on the theory, while the second part will focus ...
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Pimp your PVS 1 – auto patcher
Today, I would like to start new tradition - series of blog posts about useful scripts that you can use to simplify the management and troubleshooting of your PVS environment. To give you some sneak peak, I'm going to talk about automatic replication of your vDisks, I would like to talk about getting balloon notifications when your write cache is running out of space or how you ...
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How to hide desktops from XenApp Services\PNAgent site?
When you use single XenApp Services site to manage both XenApp and XenDesktop environments or you're providing published desktop and applications from your XenApp farm, you've probably noticed that your users will get desktop icon in their start menu and\or desktop. Well, I've run into this issue recently during my project and I thought it just doesn't look really professional and decided to fix this cosmetic ...
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How to tighten the security of Windows desktops
One of the most important consulting skill is ability to prioritize and identify the most effective approach to meet the customer\project goals. Pareto principle (also known as 80:20 rule, or law of the vital few) is critical in success and every professional consultant should be aware of it (and benefit from it). Pareto principle allows us (consultants) to deliver something of a value to the ...
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Extend your XenCenter – RDP connect, open services and event viewer…
Intro (if you just want the plugins, skip this section) Lazy people are sometimes the most productive people you can find in IT. During my career, I’ve seen many people employed in IT that were really inventive when it comes to figuring how to do less work. You could even say that it’s one of the most important traits when it comes to scripting for example. There ...
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Provisioning Services and Powershell – easier method
As you've maybe noticed, default cmdlets for PVS are returning text array and not regular .NET objects - since Powershell is object-oriented scripting language, it can be quite complicate to manipulate with the output if you want to process it automatically (and not just display on the screen). As a temporary workaround, I wrote a function that can convert output from MCLI.exe to regular objects with ...
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Troubleshooting XenDesktop brokering process
NOTICE: Since WordPress is corrupting posted Powershell code, you can download all the Powershell samples here. One of the common errors you can encounter during your XenDesktop deployment are VDAs that are stuck in Unregistered state – if you have a look at support forums, you can find quite a lot of questions about this issue. There are different reasons why people write blog posts – sometimes ...
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Slow Web Interface\MMC console? CRL explained
This is actually very common problem in many environments – Web Interface and\or particular consoles (mostly MMC-based) are slow to start – there is actually KB article that describes a workaround for this issue. I consider this to be one of the tweaks that many people often implement, but don’t really understand the consequences and the reasons why it helps, so I’ve decided to write ...