Windows Server 2008

Retrieve XenDesktop version

If you have inherited a XenDesktop environment or you are just doing an audit and need to know which version of XenDesktop version you are running you can use PowerShell to retrieve that information for you.  The command to issue is: Get-BrokerController This will give you similar output to below where you can view the …

Powershell, Scripting

Learn PowerShell in a month of Lunches–Chapter 3 answers

1 Can you find any cmdlets capable of converting other cmdlets’ output into HTML? ConvertTo-Html 2 Are there any cmdlets that can redirect output into a file, or to a printer? Out-File  & Out-Printer 3 How many cmdlets are available for working with processes? Get-Process                       Cmdlet    Gets the processes that are running on the local …

SCVMM

Unable to add Server 2012 Hyper-V host to SCVMM 2012

Good morning from a nice and sunny Manchester!! With the release of Server 2012 I have decided to upgrade everything I can in my lab to Server 2012 so I can get some experience with it.  As part of my lab I run SCVMM 2012 for Citrix XenDesktop 5.6.  When I attempted to add the …

Hyper-V, Virtualization

Unable to power on a 64-Bit Nested VM

In this article I am going to show you how to resolve a problem that you will hit when using VMware Workstation to nest virtual machines.  In my test environment which consists of mainly my laptop I like to test and run multiple hypervisors, mainly ESXi and Hyper-V. When building my lab from scratch I …

Citrix XenDesktop

Snap-in is not responding in XenDesktop Desktop Studio

Hi Folks!! A common issue I see happen all the time which most people put up with but I do not is the Citrix XenDesktop 5.6 Desktop Studio being extremely slow to start up and also you receive an error saying “This snap-in is not responding”  Luckily the fix is nice and simple!! Go into …

Citrix XenApp, Virtualization

Configuring HDX Flash Redirection for XenApp

I have spent the last few days fighting with HDX Flash Redirection and trying to get it to work for a demo to show to a few customers. There are certain things which you have to do to get this working properly. HDX Flash Redirection basically takes a lot of load of the XenApp servers …

ESXi 5.0, Virtualization

Installing ESXi5 under VMware Workstation 8

This is just a quick blog post to show you how to install VMware ESXi5 under VMware Workstation.  Being able to do this makes a great learning environment as you can create and destroy as many virtual machines as you like.  In my lab i have 2 permanent hosts running ESXi 5 but if i …

ESXi 5.0

Enable remote console connection to ESXi 5 host through the GUI

I recently installed 2 ESXi 5 servers into my lab to assist with my ESXi 5 certification update. In my home lab i do not have a spare monitor so each time i have to display the console i have to unplug the monitor from my main PC and plug it in which is a …

VCAP-DCA

Installing and configuring PowerCLI

In this article i am going to go over the steps to install and configure PowerCLI to run on my virtual center server. This will enable me to interrogate all the virtual machines and VMware environment by using Powershell. 1) The first step is to download Powershell v2.0 from Microsoft. Note this is only applicable …