This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Custom RemoteFX RDS Farm

While waiting for the cases/power supplies to arrive for our RDS Server Farm I thought we might as well fire one up and do a little stress testing, the first results (which look at application load times) can be seen below.

Here you see pretty much the entire Office 2007 and Adobe CS6 suite (with a few other programs thrown in for fun) load in almost no time at all.
In the background we had 6 students playing videos on YouTube (RemoteFX doing its thing) however this realy is just a test of the OCZ Vertex 4 SSD.

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Sequencing Adobe CS6 for App-V

With any luck if you have followed the previous instructions to the letter you should now have a perfectly working App-V package for any of the Adobe CS6 applications, to confirm that the licence is applying correctly you should see a command prompt window appear just before any of the Adobe applications load just as you see in the series of screen shots above.

So the question that everyone is asking – how on earth does this work?

Well basically….
The script that we included in the OSD file tells App-V to run a mini application that licences the Adobe Application every time it launches. This in turn overcomes the way that CS6 binds its self to a machines hardware ID when licenced.

So simple really! If you are having more problems with getting Adobe stuff through App-V check those prerequisites again as this is a common cause of issues!

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Sequencing Adobe CS6 for App-V

The next stop in this series of posts is your App-V Sequencing machine, in this case I will be running the sequencer as a virtual machine running in Hyper-V with a snapshot created to restore back to a clean machine quickly if needed.

3. Get the App-V sequencing going (but in a particular way)

Getting your Adobe software through the sequencer isn’t that much different from most other programs, the basics are you run a silent installer, include an additional folder in the Q drive (that one with the licence file/serialization file in) and also add something into the OSD file which activates Adobe each time you run it.

One thing you will need is a little bit later on is a snippet of script which I have put below to make it easy to copy/paste in.

  CS6 Serial Code (241 bytes, 3,073 hits)

Everything else you need is in the screen shots below 🙂 Continue reading

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Sequencing Adobe CS6 for App-V

First off to get one thing clear – YES YOU CAN PUT THE ENTIRE ADOBE CS6 PACKAGE THROUGH APP-V!!

I won’t say its easy or simple and you won’t be able to put the entire master collection in a single package but by following the instructions in this series you will be able to do it.

As a little background you should be aware of the following details, there are a few links below that may help you tweak the instructions I will provide in this series of posts-

  • You need a number of prerequisite applications/DLLs installed on both your clients and sequencing PCs, all of these can be deployed by good old GPO/SCCM
    • These prerequisites can be found in <Adobe Install Folder>\Adobe CS6\payloads and all the ones you need are highlighted in this image link
  • You will need the Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition 3.0 to prepare the Adobe software, licence keys (which you should have already) and Adobe online login
    • This should be installed on a PC other than the clients/sequencing PC
    • You only need it during the initial prep and can be uninstalled after
  • To give you a decent background on the AAMEE tool you should watch the following two videos
  • You should have at least background knowledge of App-V OSD files and using scripting with them, a good read can be seen here How to run scripts in an .osd file in Microsoft App-V

Continue reading

Lets say you have downloaded the files for Adobe CS6 from the Adobe Volume Licence (VL) Site, just installed Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition to get a MSI made with your serial number/ect setup and ready.
However, every time you try to point the Product Installation Folder at your download from the Adobe VL site all you get is the error

A valid installer could not be found.

The simple solution to this problem is to first extract the data from the download from the Adobe website and then point the Adobe Application Manager at this folder with the extracted files in.

The screen shots below show this process a little more clearly.

I’m quite a perfectionist when it comes to making sure that hardware runs with the latest firmware, quite often these software updates bring improved stability and features. In SSDs though it quite commonly brings about performance boosts.

However when trying to update the Vertex 4s I recently received to build a Custom RDS Farm I would go to update the drive, reboot the system (as directed) only to find that there hadn’t been any firmware update at all!

I started experimenting and one fix I have found is to flash the drive, shut down the PC and then remove the SATA power/data cables from the drive and leave the drive un-powered for a few minutes.
Next reboot the PC with the drive plugged back in and lone behold its updated!

The screen shots below show this in a little more detail.

Sometimes you will want to connect to a particular server in a RDS load balanced farm (maybe you want to perform a particular update on that server or something similar) however when you RDP onto it the load balancer kicks in and you may not get the server you were after.

The simple solution is to start a remote desktop session to that server using the /admin switch.

The screen shots below show one of many methods you could use to start the session.

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 at the connection broker which then decides which session host they should be logging into.

In my case the servers have only 2 hops between themselves and the endpoints over a fibre optic to a local network switch and then down copper 10/100mb to the client. For the time being the endpoints are just re purposed PCs however we hope to replace them with dedicated thin clients (mainly for power saving reasons) in the next few months.

The connection broker will be hosted as a virtual machine on one of our Hyper-V servers however to make use of RemoteFX technology (will go into this in a little more depth in a later post) the session hosts will all be running directly off physical hardware. Continue reading

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 show stopper in this has been the lack of graphics acceleration which performing graphics intensive tasks difficult if not impossible.

Luckily Server 2008 R2 SP1 has come around with RemoteFX technology – this allows you to harness the power of graphics processing in a server. Another issue crops up though – few if any servers (from leading OEMs like HP and Dell) support graphics cards and those that do are just as expensive as normal PCs.

My solutions is – build custom servers out of AMD Fusion APUs (which combine a powerful CPU and GPU on one chip) in true ‘cookie sheet style’.

This series of posts looks at the hardware, software and endpoints (fat thin clients) that I’m going to be using in this project.

A few days ago some of our Windows 7 clients were having a Windows Update error, the specific message was

Windows could not search for new updates

An error occurred while checking for new updates for your computer.

Error(s) found:

Code 800B0001 Windows Update  encountered an unknown error.

The funny thing was the clients could still get updates from Microsoft Update however anything from our Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) Server would result in this error message.

As it turns out Microsoft had updated the Windows Update client on Windows 7 and that an update (the number is KB2720211) was required on the WSUS server to allow the clients to continue to update.

Simple solution is to approve this update in WSUS and apply it to your servers, a bit of a pain is that this update requires a reboot of the server but hey its that or no updates for your clients!

For a nice walk through see the screenshots below

Update – For Windows Server 2012

A further update has been released to allow WSUS 3.0 SP2 to provide updates for Windows Server 2012 – details can be found at KB2938066.