Monday, February 28, 2011

Quest vWorkspace 7.2 - certification

Last week I followed the 4-day training (and passed the exam afterwards) and became Quest vWorkspace certified. For those who never heard of the product, a quick introduction:


“…Quest vWorkspace manages, secures and provisions virtual desktop environments as well as brokers connections. It delivers virtual applications and desktops from multiple hypervisors, Remote Desktop Session Hosts (Terminal Servers) and blade PCs through a single user access point and management center, while increasing user adoption with an optimal user experience…”

For more info see here: http://www.quest.com/vworkspace/

Although parts of the product contain some similarities with existing Microsoft products like RD Gateway, RD, WebAccess, RD Easyprint (also see earlier post) and Virtual IP, the vWorkspace (and especially the new release 7.2) has some really interesting features that extend the existing Microsoft technologies and (what I think is important) without completely replacing them!

Being a Microsoft-minded guy I especially like the seamless integration with the Hyper-V platform, Remote Desktop Services (RDSH) and VDI based on Windows 7.

Besides these integrations for managing your virtual environment vWorkspace comes with a lot of features that make the life of a systems administrator much easier. Like for example the ability to extending a users roaming profile with additional folders or regkeys to be saved on central storage upon logoff (MetaProfiles-IT). I think we can all agree that we love RD easyprint, quest vWorkspace takes printing even a bit further with Print-IT because on top of a universal printerdriver it support things like Bandwith Control and data compression split into compression for graphics and text within an single document and it is supported on RDSH (TS) servers as well as VDI.

Using USB-IT vWorkspace enables VDI clients to seamlessly access their USB-based handhelds over RDP connections on the fly, so no need to logoff.

vWorkspace also offers the patent-pending technology, Quest EOP Xtream. It accelerates RDP traffic on wide area networks (WANs). This provides for an improved user experience by providing faster RDP screen responses and improved performance of all EOP features. ( How EOP Xtream in Quest vWorkspace accelerates RemoteFX by 62% )

The 7.2 release can also be used with a first set of Powershell commands. A PowerShell library for vWorkspace is available at http://communities.quest.com/community/vworkspace

Since 7.2 they’ve also extended the logging capabilities by adding a logging feature into a separate database that holds all history about what happened when. There is a Quest logging interface to view reports based on SQL queries, but you can easily connect thing like SQL Server reporting services to it to generate those reports that CEO’s tend to like.

I’ve had the pleasure to take the course and play with vWorkspace in a Quest lab environment to get a good feeling with all the features. I will be setting up a demo environment myself as well to test it a bit more thoroughly and might devote some more posts on this.

For more general info also see:

general vWorkspace info:
http://www.quest.com/vworkspace/
The vWorkspace community forum:
http://communities.quest.com/community/vworkspace
Info about the new 7.2 release:
http://www.quest.com/vworkspace/new-release.aspx

RemoteFX documentation overview

Microsoft have been creating new and updating existing documentation on deploying and testing RemoteFX. The RDS blogteam on MSDN.com created a post last week with a list of all the RemoteFX documents that were published to coincide with the Windows Server 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1 release. It contains a great list of all the references that you might need for setting up Remote FX so I thought I’d cross-post it here.
The following documents were created for Microsoft RemoteFX:
The following existing Remote Desktop Services documents were updated to include Microsoft RemoteFX:

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Installing GALSync 4.2 on Forefront Identity Manager 2010 (FIM)

Installing GALSync 4.2 on Forefront Identity Manager 2010 (FIM)

New blogpost arrived today (23-02-11) on blogs.technet.com about installing GALSync 4.2 on Forefront Identity Manager 2010 (FIM) !

"...Download the galsync msi file onto your box. Specific Galsync requirements (including those needed for setting up a Galsync account) can be found here… http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/dd575560.aspx. The documentation currently states that Galsync will only work on ILM 2007 FP1, however, it will work with the FIM synchronization engine by following this guide. I have not tested this with FIM Update Package 1..."

For the full article see here:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/kristinw/archive/2011/02/23/installing-galsync-4-2-on-forefront-identity-manager-fim.aspx
















Additional info:
How Outlook Live Directory Sync Works Learn the terminology, underlying concepts, and synchronization logic.
Plan Your Outlook Live Directory Sync Deployment Before you deploy, make sure you have everything ready to go.
Deploy Outlook Live Directory Sync Follow this step-by-step guide to deploy and configure OLSync.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 are available

*** Windows 7 SP1 available and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 available ***

As you might have heard, M
icrosoft RTM'ed SP1 for Windows 7 as well as Windows Server 2008 R2 !!

It will be available for public download (and available via Windows Update Services) as per february 22. Volume Licensed, MSDN and TechNet Subscriptions will have access to it since yesterday (february 16).

Happy downloading!

For more info see this blog post:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2011/02/09/windows-server-2008-r2-and-windows-7-sp1-releases-to-manufacturing-today.aspx

*** Windows 7 SP1 available and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 available ***

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

New rollup hotfix package for Forefront Identity Manager 2010 released

A new rollup hotfix package has been released for Forefront Identity Manager 2010 (FIM).

It's build number is 4.0.3573.2 Lots of issues have been fixed in it! For example improvements to initial load performance in the FIM MA!

For more details see here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2417774

The direct hotfix request link:
http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=2417774&kbln=en-us