When you’ve installed a Remote Desktop Services or XenApp servers on your VMware environment, you don’t want to enable the VMware Tools tray icon. By default there’s an tray icon for all your users. Using the following registry key, the tray icon will disappear.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\VMware, Inc.\VMware Tools]
“ShowTray”=dword:00000000

Now the VMware Tools tray icon is gone for all the users!

Today I had to migrate the configuration from Windows 2003 RADIUS to Windows 2008 R2 NPS server. With the following steps, it’s just a few mouse clicks

1.) Mount or extract the Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 DVD in your Windows 2003 server (the RADIUS server)
2.) Browse to the following directory
D:\Sources\dlmanifests\microsoft-windows-iasserver-migplugin
3.) Copy this folder to your C: drive of the Windows 2003 server
4.) Open a command line box
5.) Run the iasmigreader.exe
6.) This tool will read your IAS configuration and exports it to C:\Windows\System32\IAS\IAS.txt
7.) Copy this file to your new Windows 2008 R2 NPS server (In my example C:\_IAS)
8.) Open a command line box on your Windowws 2008 R2 NPS server
9.) Enter the following command
netsh nps import filename=”C:\_IAS\IAS.txt”
10.) The configuration will be imported now
11.) Don’t forget to register your NPS service in AD or configuration settings be damned, NPS will just not work.

When you want to upgrade your Windows 2003 domain to 2008 R2, there’re a few steps you’ve to take.

1.) Login on a Windows 2003 domain controller
2.) Insert the Windows 2008 R2 DVD or attach the ISO
3.) Open a command prompt CMD
4.) Browse to the following map of the Windows 2008 R2 DVD
x:\Support\Adprep
5.) First you’re going to prepare the forest with the new schema extensions
adprep32.exe /forestprep
Note! Because Windows Server 2003 is a 32 bits platform, you’ve to use adprep32.exe. If your’re using adprep.exe, you’ll receive the following error: “The image file adprep.exe is valid, but is for a machine type other than the current machine.” Windows Server 2008 R2 is only available in 64 bits.
6.) Make sure that all the domain controllers are replicated
7.) The next step is to prepare the domain and the GPO’s
adprep32.exe /domainprep /gpprep
Note! When you want to add a Read-Only Domain Controller (RODC) to your environment in the future, you’ve have to execute another command.
adprep.exe /rodcprep
8.) Your domain is now ready for installing the new Windows Server 2008 R2 Domain Controllers.
9.) Run the command DCPROMO on the new Windows Server 2008 R2 machines

With the following registry key, you can remove the Network from Windows Explorer. Users cannot browse the network anymore.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\NonEnum\{F02C1A0D-BE21-4350-88B0-7367FC96EF3C}]=dword:00000001

A nice solution to deploy this registry key to all your desktop computers in your organization, is to use Group Policy Preferences. This is a new feature within Windows Server 2008.

Use can use the following steps to configure this:

1.) Create a new GPO whtin the Group Policy Management Console
2.) Open the new GPO en navigate to the Computer Settings. (It’s a HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE settings)
3.) Navigate to Preferences \ Windows Settings \ Registry
4.) Create a new Registry Item
5.) Actie: Update
6.) Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
7.) Key Path: SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\NonEnum
8.) Value name: {F02C1A0D-BE21-4350-88B0-7367FC96EF3C}
9.) Value type: REG_DWORD
10.) Value data: 1 (Decimal), 00000001 (Hexadecimal)

In some situations our customers want to see the drive letters first, instead of the drive name. For example (C:) SYSTEM or SYSTEM (C:). You can edit this with the following registry key:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer]
“ShowDriveLettersFirst”=dword:00000004

Today i’ve setup a new Windows 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services environment. When I configure the GPO “force classic start menu”, all users have the icons “Libraries” and “Control Panel” available on the desktop. You can fix this problem to delete the following resgistry keys:

1.) Make a local user on the server (Windows Server 2008 R2 in my environment)
2.) Make the user member of the local administrators group on your server
3.) Login in with this user and customize for example the start menu
4.) Logoff and login again with an administrator account
5.) Create a share on your file server. For example \\SRV-RDSDC-01\TSmandatory
6.) For share permissions choose Everyone Full Control, NTFS permissions choose Authenticated Users Read
7.) Turn off Caching on this share
8.) Copy the complete template folder from the C:\Users directory to the new TSmandatory share
9.) Rename the template folder to TSmandatory.V2
You have to add the .V2 in the name of your folder, because it’s the new profile type in Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2!
10.) Delete the Local and LocalLow folders from the AppData folder
11.) The next step is to add the right permissions on the mandatory profile
12.) Open REGEDIT and load the NTUSER.DAT hive
13.) Right-click on the TS Mandatory profile and choose permissions
14.) Delete the template user and add the Authenticated Users (Full Control)
15.) Unload the NTUSER.DAT from your registry
16.) Rename the NTUSER.DAT to NTUSER.MAN
17.) When you configure a GPO to specify the location of the Mandatory profile, you’ve to choose to following location:
\\SRV-RDSDC-01\TSmandatory\TSmandatory without the .V2!

With this nice tool you’re able to manage your Windows 2008 R2 server Core Edition through a graphical user interface. This tool is open source, so if you want something more in it, go ahead!

Core Configuration tasks include:

- Product Licensing
- Networking Features
- DCPromo Tool
- ISCSI Settings
- Server Roles and Features
- User and Group Permissions
- Share Creation and Deletion
- Dynamic Firewall settings
- Display | Screensaver Settings
- Add & Remove Drivers
- Proxy settings
- Windows Updates (Including WSUS)
- Multipath I/O
-Hyper-V including virtual machine thumbnails
- JoinDomain and Computer rename
- Add/remove programs
- Services
- WinRM
-Complete logging of all commands executed

You can download the tool here.