While trying to run the LSI Predictor on one of my servers I was getting the error message Please install Microsoft (R) Windows (R) Performance Analyzer Version 4.8.7701 It took a while to nail down what I actually needed to get this installed however the solution is hidden away in the Windows SDK (the link is for Windows 7 but… Read more
Tag: Windows Server 2008 R2
AMD FX and Hyper-V – Hypervisor is not running
Its a long shot that many people will have this issue but hey why not! If you have one of the uber new AMD FX Processors (e.g. the 6 core 6100BE) and have tried to run a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine on it you may have seen this error message. An error occurred while attempting to start the… Read more
Custom RemoteFX RDS Farm – Stress test 2 – How many users per server?
Its looking like we got our sizing for our custom RDS servers right and we may well have answered (at least for own internal use) ‘how many users can you get on a RDS server?’. The video shows our RDS farm under normal load with 24 clients remotely logged in (excluding the admin session I was using) with the CPU… Read more
Moodle Error, new users LDAP and SSO (NTLM)
After recently setting up a Moodle install (hosted on IIS on Server 2008 R2) with SSO (LDAP server based (good old Microsoft AD) with NTLM looking after things) we found that any new users were getting this error message appearing. Fatal error: $CFG->dataroot is not writable, admin has to fix directory permissions! Exiting. The simple solution is to this problem is… Read more
Custom RemoteFX RDS Farm – Case close up
Well its taken a little while but the light at the end of the RDS Farm tunnel is in sight! After heavily modifying two X-Case RM 206 HS cases we now have our first batch of cookie sheet style servers ready for use. The video above goes around a bit of a tour of the case and the photos below… Read more
Custom RemoteFX RDS Farm – Stress test 1 – Disk IO
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… Read more
Custom RemoteFX RDS Farm – Farm Architecture + Hardware Specs
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
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
Axel M80 thin client – nice for the office not so sure about the classroom
A little while ago the guys at Axel let me borrow one of their M80 thin clients to try out with Citrix VDI-in-a-Box and also Microsoft RDS (Server 2008 R2) and I’m happy to say I can easily see this as a good thin client to use in the office although I have my reservations about use in classroom. This review… Read more
What does it take to run a Citrix VDI-in-a-Box Proof of Concept?
One of the wonderful things about Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V is that any driver that was written for Windows 7 will also run in Server 2008 R2! As such its very easy to take any Window 7 compatible PC (with a processor that can do hardware assisted virtualization like the AMD A and FX series) and turn it into… Read more