Custom RemoteFX RDS Farm – Farm Architecture + Hardware Specs

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Custom RemoteFX RDS Farm

Following on from my first post I am going to look at what will make up by RemoteFX RDS farm including the software and hardware architecture. First I’ve started out as you would with any small RDS farm; in this case with 4 session hosts and a single connection broker (which will also act as licence server). The 30 endpoints are pointed… Read more



Custom RemoteFX RDS Farm – The Intro

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Custom RemoteFX RDS Farm

Sufficed to say budgets are still tight for schools and nothing chews through the budget more than replacing a computer room full of PCs. One alternative has always been to convert the PCs in the room to ‘fat thin clients’ with a small OS (say Windows Thin PC) and hook them up to a Terminal Server/Remote Desktop Services Farm. The biggest… Read more



Installing the product key into an evaluation version of System Centre 2012 Virtual Machine Manager

So you’ve got your shiny new System Centre 2012 Virtual Machine Manager install up and running, Virtual Hosts are running, you’ve done P2V migrations of a few old machines all during the while you are watching the ‘Evaluation Version – xyz days remaining’ ticker counting down. So where do I put this product key? You may think its in settings,… Read more



MMC could not create the snap in – Server 2008

After recently performing an in place upgrade from Server 2008 Standard to Server 2008 Enterprise (I was after using the DFS features on this particular server) I started receiving an odd error message when trying to load server manager. The full message is MMC could not create the snap-in. The snap-in might not have been installed correctly. Name: Server Manager… Read more



Showcase your Server

One of the main aims of myworldofit.net is to share with other IT Admins simple solutions to problems they may encounter, in part of that goal I have posted up details of some of the bits of server hardware I use to keep things going (e.g. this post on my latest backup server). Through my new website showcaseyourserver.net I’m extending… Read more



Windows Server 2008 R2 bare metal backup – which drives?

If you are running System Centre Data Protection Manager (2010/2012) on Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2 you may or may not know that when you are running a Bare Metal/System State Backup you are actually using the built in Windows Server Backup feature to keep your data safe. One thing that baffled me is why on some servers the backups… Read more



Virtual Desktops on PCI-E SSD – 19 users @ 2ms response time!

This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series Virtual Desktops on PCI-E SSD

Currently our VDI setup is only used in the Library and so we very rarely max out the usage on our server, however ealier today I spotted that we had 19 of our 20 VDI clients in use, by in use thats students logged in actively engaging with their computers. I couldn’t resist checking up on the performance stats and… Read more





Virtual Desktops on PCI-E SSD – Why HDD should still be involved

This entry is part 4 of 6 in the series Virtual Desktops on PCI-E SSD

One of the most interesting features of the OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 is that in many situations you can boot a OS right off the drive (great for super fast gaming PCs). The only issue with this is not every motherboard out there will support booting right off a PCI-E SSD (OCZ do have a list here though) but also more… Read more



Time for a new backup server

For the past few months we’ve had a donated storage server sitting in our storage room, with 8x1TB HDDs it was the perfect chance for us to supplement our daily tape backups with the speed of hard drives and move tape to monthly. The only issue was that the server came with a rather pants Intel Core2Duo processor that didn’t… Read more