How to: Save your DPI settings in Windows 2008 R2 with mandatory profiles using RES Workspace Manager 2012

In Windows 2008 R2, users have the ability to change their DPI settings. When users change their DPI settings, they have to logoff and login again before the new settings are live. But….what if you’re using mandatory profiles. When the users logs off, the profile is unloaded and the settings are also gone!! The users are logging in again, and the new and “clean” mandatory profile is loaded, whitout the DPI settings!

When you’re using RES Workspace Manager, you can save the DPI settings when the users logoff and load the settings when the users login, also when you’re using mandatory profile! By default there are three options to choose:

1.) Smaller – 100% = 96 DPI (Pixels/Dots Per Inch)
2.) Medium – 125% = 120 DPI (Pixels/Dots Per Inch)
3.) Larger – 150% = 144 DPI (Pixels/Dots Per Inch)

Use the following steps to save the DPI settings for your users.

1.) Create a new global Zero Profling setting within RES Workspace Manager
2.) Save a registry value HKEY_Current_User\Control Panel\Desktop\LogPixels
3.) Login with a mandatory profile and change your DPI settings
4.) Logoff your session (now your DPI settings are saved using RES Zero Proling)
5.) Login again with a mandatory profile and look for your DPI settings

DPI-01    DPI-02    DPI-03
DPI-04

 

Windows 8 Client Hyper-V copy/paste

A new feature within Windows 8 is Client Hyper-V. So within our Client OS you can run Hyper-V, that’s cool!! When you want to copy and paste some text, for example a script, this is not that easy as drag and drop or copy/paste! Is it possible? Yes, absolutely!!

The thing you need to do is copy the text on your local system, navigate back to your quest machine (VM), select the clipboard tab and hit Type clipboard text. Now you text is copied from the local machine into your quest machine!

2013-04-26_17h05_17    2013-04-26_17h09_35

ConfigMgr 2012 client installation on Windows 8 returns an error 0x800b101

Last week I have been working on a Windows 8 deployment with ConfigMgr 2012. After configuring a new task sequence, I was able to deploy the first Windows 8 image to one of many virtual desktops. The deployment went fine, until the ConfigMgr client installation. Okay, so what about now. Let’s have a look in the CCMSETUP.LOG on the client. I received the following error:
“Couldn’t verify C:\WINDOWS\ccmsetup\MicrosoftPolicyPlatformSetup.msi authenticode signature. Return code 0x800b101”.

After some search on Microsoft TechNet, I found the solution for this problemn. Microsoft has released a hotfix for this error (KB2801987) . You have to request this hotfix by e-mail.

After requesting and downloading the hotfix, you have to install this hotfix on your primary site server. It wil create a new update package named “KB 2801987 – server update – P01”. If you browse to your client installation files on your primary site server, you’ll also see that the timestamp has changed. So the ConfigMgr client installation files are also updated! Make sure you update the distribution point(s) with the new version of the ConfigMgr 2012 client installation package.

Now you’re able to succesfully deploy Windows 8 with the ConfigMgr 2012 client.

WIN8_01    WIN8_02    WIN8_03

WIN8_04    WIN8_05    WIN8_06

WIN8_07    WIN8_08    WIN8_09

WIN8_10    WIN8_11    WIN8_12

WIN8_13    WIN8_14    WIN8_15

WIN8_16    WIN8_17    WIN8_18

How to: Create a Shutdown/Restart/Logoff Windows 8 Tile for the Start menu

In the Microsoft Script Center you can download a powershell script to create a Shutdown/Restart/Logoff tile for the Start menu in Windows 8. This is so cool!! 🙂 It’s also very easy to use when you connect to an Windows 8 machine through the Remote Desktop Protocol, you’re now able to shutdown this host remotely!

http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Create-a-ShutdownRestartLog-37c8111d

1.) Fist edit the Execution Policy on your desktop
Set-ExecutionPolicy unrestricted
2.) Type the command Import-Module <path to script>
Import-Module
C:\Script\CreateWindowsTile.psm1
3.) Type the command New-OSCWindowsTile
4.) Navigate to start and there are the three new tiles!

       

   

Windows 8 Activation Error: DNS name does not exist Error Code: 0x8007232B

Today I’ve installed Windows 8 on my laptop. When I tried to activate Windows, I received the following error: “DNS name does not exist. Error code 0x8007232B”. The product key is right, so what goes wrong…

This issue was documented in this Microsoft Support article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929826 for previous versions of Windows but also applies to Windows 8.

After reading this support article, I’ve used the following command:
slmgr.vbs /ipk xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx
Typer your personal product key. Now you could activate your Windows 8 machine! 🙂

   

An update is available for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 KMS hosts to support Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012

This update extends the Key Management Service (KMS) for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to allow enterprise licensing of Windows 8 and of Windows Server 2012. KMS provides support for the following KMS client activations:

  • Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1)
  • Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2)
  • Windows 8
  • Windows Server 2012
  • Windows 7 and Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1)
  • Windows Vista and Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2)

Key Management Service (KMS) uses a KMS host key to activate KMS on a KMS host, and to establish a local activation service in your environment. This update extends support for KMS to provide activation for Windows 8 and for Windows Server 2012.

Download the hotfix here.

Windows 8 Hyper-V Feature Glossary

Within a few months, the release of Windows 8 is there. Windows 8 means also a new version of Hyper-V, that’s great news! Hyper-V 3.0 means also a lot of new features and possibilities. MVP Aidan Finn posted a great feature glossary. In this blogpost Aidan gives an overview of all the new great features whitin Hyper-V 3.0. Special thanks to him, great job!

Feature Description
Active/Active File Share Clusters Using CSV and a witness as features, you can create an active/active file share failover cluster. This is supported for services that use large file with little metadata access, e.g. Hyper-V. In other words, you can use a file share cluster instead of a SAN for your Hyper-V cluster.
Asymmetric Hyper-V Cluster A single cluster with Hyper-V and Active/Active File Server roles
BitLocker & HA The ability to encrypt parent partition disks and cluster shared volumes using BitLocker for physical security of virtual machines and data. Uses a Cluster Name Object (CNO) for locking and unlocking CSVs.
Boot From SAN VMs can boot from iSCSI or Fibre Channel disks, rather than just the traditional VHD(X)
Cluster Aware Updating Automate the Windows Update process for clustered hosts. It automatically drains hosts of VMs and patches them in order.
Cluster Scalability Up to 63 hosts and up to 4,000 VMs
Concurrent Live Migration Perform many live migrations at once between two hosts, with the only limit being your bandwidth.
Converged Fabrics Simplified host networking by merging all of the various LAN, SAN, and cluster networks to a reduced number of teamed high bandwidth NICs.
CSVFS CSVs are easier to backup. Although they are still NTFS, they appear as CSVFS for easier identification as CSVs in disk administration tools.
Data Center Bridging DCB enables very different networking protocols to run on the same network infrastructure, and therefore helps enable the convergence of LANs and SANs onto a single unified fabric.
Dedup & Thin Provisioning Windows 8 can use just the storage space that is required by not needlessly storing “empty” space (thin provisioning) or redundant data (de-duplication)
DHCP Guard Ban DHCP traffic from rogue DHCP services running in VMs.
Direct I/O Backup VMs on Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) can be backed up without Redirected I/O (Mode/Access).
Drain VMs Easy host maintenance by draining VMs from the host
Dynamic Memory Minimum Memory Once a VM has booted it can balloon down to the Minimum setting if it is underutilising the memory allocated by the Startup setting.
Dynamic Virtual Machine Queue DMVQ will dynamically span processing VMQ n/w traffic across more than one CPU. It will automatically scale up and scale down the CPU utilisation based on demand
Extensibale Hyper-V Switch Replacing the virtual network, this intelligent virtual switch offers extensibility for partners, with products already announced by the likes of Cisco and Brocade.
Failover Prioritisation Order the failover of VMs based on application dependencies.
Guest Application Monitoring Configure Failover Clustering to restart or failover VMs based on monitored events that occur inside of the VM.
Guest NUMA Virtual machines are aware of Non-Uniform Memory Architecture and can schedule processes in accordance with memory placement at the physical layer. Guest NUMA can be customised on a per-VM basis.
High Availability A feature of Failover Clustering, allowing a service or VM to failover from one host to another, enabling machine fault tolerance and maintenance windows with minimised service downtime.
Host Scalability 160 physical logical processors, up to 2 TB RAM, removal of the 8:1 logical to virtual processor limit.
Hyper-V Replica Asynchronous replication of virtual machines from one location to another, supporting VSS snapshots, failover, and IP address injection.
IPsec Task Offload IPsecTO moves this workload from the main host’s CPU to a dedicated processor on the network adapter
Live Migration Move a virtual machine from one host to another. This does not require Failover Clustering in Windows Server 8.
Live Storage Migration Physically relocate a VM by first copying it and synchronising I/O until the source and destination are identical. Can leverage Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX) in a SAN to make the process up to 90% faster.
Multi-Tenancy With features such as Network Virtualisation, PVLANs, and PORT ACLs, you can use Windows 8 Hyper-V in multi-tenant environments such as IaaS public cloud hosting.
Native 4k disk support This will allow disk alignment for VHDs created on 4k sector physical disks, thus improving performance.
Network Virtualisation The abstraction of virtual IP address from physical IP address, allowing easier mobility of VMs across fabrics. This is a key feature of multi-tenancy.
NIC Teaming Team NICs in Windows Server 8 (and Hyper-V) for bandwidth aggregation and network path fault tolerance. The NICs do not need to be from the same manufacturer.
Online Disk Repair Windows 8 will detect storage faults and incrementally fix them with brief delays to I/O traffic that don’t interrupt it. Should replace the need for offline chkdsk.
Port ACLs Define allowed communication paths between virtual machines based on IP range or MAC address.
PowerShell Hyper-V has around 150 built-in PowerShell cmdlets. 100% of features are revealed via PowerShell.
PVLAN VLANs are slow to configure in the physical network and there is a limit on how many can be configured. Private VLANs allow Hyper-V to replace this physical networking feature.
QoS Specify maximum limits and minimum guarantees for network communications.
Receive Side Coalescing RSC aggregates packets from the same TCP/IP flow into one larger packet, reducing per-packet processing costs for faster TCP/IP processing
Receive Side Scaling RSS allows the receive side network load from a network adapter to be shared across multiple processors
Remote Direct Memory Access RDMA enables more efficient access of data on file shares.
Resource Metering Measure CPU, network and memory on a per-VM basis. This data is stored with the VM and moves with the VM.
Single Root I/O Virtualisation SR-IOV allows a physical NIC to appear to be a number of physical NICs, and allows virtual machine networking to bypass the virtual switch.
SMB 2.2 SMB 2.2 supports RDMA and is in Windows Server 8. Storage of VMs is supported on SMB 2.2. file shares. With NIC teaming, you get multi-channel SMB.
Snapshot Live Merge You do not have to shut down a VM to merge a snapshot in Windows 8, resolving a major support issue.
Storage Pools An aggregation of disks without any RAID. They can be as loosely coupled as a bunch of USB drives. The disks can be different sizes. A pool does not appear in Explorer. You can create Storage Spaces from Storage Pools. This is one of the storage types you could use to create a scalable and continuously available active/active file share cluster.
Storage Spaces A thinly provisioned slice of storage from a storage pool. Can be a 2-copy-mirror (Like RAID 1 in concept and performance), 3-copy-mirror, or parity (like RAID 5 in concept and performance) storage space. Can be lots of spaces in a single pool. A space is divided up into slabs across disks in the pool depending on the fault tolerance chosen. Advanced configuration allows you to choose which pool disks to use.
Unified Tracing Enables network diagnostics in the Hyper-V Extensible Switch
VHDX The default virtual disk type, expanding up to 16 TB, and supporting dynamic and fixed types.
Virtual Fibre-Channel Adapter A host’s fibre channel adapter can be virtualised, thus enabling VMs to have their own WWN and direct access to the SAN.
Virtual Machine Scalability 32 virtual processors, 512 GB RAM
Virtualisation Aware Domain Controllers Windows Server 8 domain controllers are aware if they are Windows 8 Hyper-V VMs. This prevents USN rollback (VM restore or snapshot application).
Windows 8 Client Hyper-V is included in the client operating system for free. It’s the same Hyper-V as in the server, offering VM mobility and an easy introduction to Microsoft’s enterprise virtualisation.  The client version of Hyper-V requires Second Level Address Translation (SLAT)  in the CPU (Intel EPT, AMD RVI/NPT).  This is not a requirement in the server version, but it is recommended.

It is a long list of features, and absolutely great to see all this new possibilities. I can’t wait until the release of Windows 8… 🙂