my world of IT

In this series I am going to be looking at how PCI-E SSDs can be used with VDI, I’ll be covering the hardware in use, the user experience and also why I believe PCI-E SSDs to be the best option to get your virtual desktops running as fast as possible.

For quite some time now we’ve had the odd thing that all the clocks on our Citrix VDI-in-a-Box virtual desktops have been out by 7 hours. First thought was that the sysprep process was putting in the wrong timezone however if this was the case then surely there would be some people having the same issues and posting up on… Read more

If you have ever tried to push Windows Live Essentials (particularly Movie Maker/Photo gallery) through App-V you may have come across this error… Couldn’t install programs Couldn’t install these programs: Photo Gallery and Movie Maker It looks like another program is preventing the installer from working. Error: 0x80070643 Source: wllogin-amd64 The reason behind this is Windows Live Essentials is trying… Read more

I’ve had my Fitbit Ultra for quite some time now and have been wondering just how long does the battery last? Well as the Fitbit website says 5-7 days but a little independent testing never went a miss so lets find out! Update – If you don’t feel like reading the whole post my Fitbit Ultra lasted a whole 18… Read more

Lets say you have a Windows 7 Notebook PC connected to a high speed LAN which has some files syncing onto it, all goes well for a little while until the sync stops randomly. You are sure there is no problem with the PC, your server that you are taking the files off or the network connection and you restart… Read more

This video shows how MDT and App-V can be used to get a OS installed on a PC (can use it with servers as well) in a very hands off way as well a quick over view of the key end user experience of App-V.

When setting up a Lync 2010 proof of concept today I was having issues with getting incoming calls to work. I could get outbound calls (to the PSTN) to work as well as hear audio both ways however under no situation would a call come in (from the PSTN) and ring the Polycom CX700 on my desk. There had to… Read more

After posting about how having lots of RAID cache has a positive impact on local disk VDI I thought it best to mash together a little guide on how to get this cache setup so here it is! All screen shots are from a HP DL385 G7 server – other HP server models may have a different UI but the… Read more

Its time to do some more VDI testing! In the short video below you will see what it is like to launch multiple programs off a Virtual Desktop that is hosted on a SSD. More info on the YouTube page 🙂

For the past few days I’ve been doing a little performance testing to see just how much an influence RAID cache makes when provisioning Virtual Desktops. The test was to create 20 virtual desktops and see how long it takes to get the first one spun up and ready for use and then to see how long it took to… Read more