VDI

Best Practice for the Windows Client Side Caching (CSC) kernel driver in VDI workloads

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It’s been a best practice for a long time to disable Offline Files in both RDSH and VDI workloads. However, this has only ever been based around the Offline Files (CscService) service and some registry tweaks.

What people don’t realize is that you must properly disable Offline Files in all VDI workloads by also disabling the Windows Client Side Caching (CSC) kernel driver as outlined by Ned Pyle here.

Even with the Offline Files (CscService) service disabled, the Windows Client Side Caching (CSC) kernel driver is still loaded at Windows startup, creating unnecessary noise and potentially impeding performance when users access a network share.

The following example is a screen shot of Process Monitor monitoring a zpaq64.exe process extracting a file to a network drive. Note how it’s continually attempting to access the CSC (Client-Side Caching) area before the network share, even though Offline Files is disabled. This creates a large number of NAME NOT FOUND errors, and adds a potential delay to the execution time.

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Best Practice for the Windows Time (W32TIME) Service for RDSH and VDI workloads

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When using image deployment mechanisms for RDSH and VDI workloads, such as Citrix PVS, Citrix MCS and VMware View Composer, it’s extremely important to reconfigure the Windows Time (w32time) Service to ensure that the LastBootUpTime is accurate. If it’s not accurate, it effects monitoring, the correlation of log data, event triggers, etc.

The default Manual trigger of the Windows Time service is based on domain membership, which seems to cause issues as the image boots and changes name to the correct target name. Without having a deep enough understanding on the inner workings of these technologies, I can only assume that the default trigger of the Windows Time service is not compatible with the way the imaging mechanisms work on boot up to change the computer name and join to an Active Directory computer object. There may be a point during startup where Windows detects that it’s not domain joined and therefore stops the Windows Time service, which seems to throw the time out.

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VDI and Storage: Deep Impact

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AWESOME document!!! This is a MUST read. http://virtuall.eu/download-document/vdi-storage-deep-impact Ruben Spruijt blogged about it on Brian Madden’s web site, and received a lot of great comments worth reading. Here is the PDF incase the link above does not work: VDI_and_Storage_-_Deep_Impact-v1.0.pdf Since the release of this document, there has been some fantastic comments and blogs posted around … Read more

WAN Emulation for VDI and SBC Testing

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WANem (Wide Area Network Emulation) is an awesome tool for emulating a WAN in your test/dev environment or even a demo lab. I use it in my demo lab to show customers how the technologies might behave in their environment.

WANem is a piece of software running on Knoppix, a well-known Linux distribution based on Debian. It comes in two forms:

  1. As an ISO that is launched through a LiveCD at computer startup.
  2. As a VMware Virtual Appliance that can be launched from a VMware platform.

You can get WANem from here: http://wanem.sourceforge.net/

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Understanding Microsoft Licensing for a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Environment

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Here is an excellent whitepaper titled “Understanding Microsoft Licensing for a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Environment” that simply explains the licensing requirements without needing a PHD to sift through the information and Briefs posted on Microsoft’s Overview of Licensing for Virtualization web page. More specifically I’m referring to the Brief on Licensing Windows Vista for … Read more

Displaying useful connection information on the desktop wallpaper

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Updated on 6th April 2010…

Like most IT professionals, I’ve been using Bginfo to embed some useful information in the wallpaper of a users Desktop for some years now. So what you say! Well…not too long ago Warren Simondson of CTRL-ALT-DEL IT Consultancy created a couple of cool utilities called TSBackdrop and PCBackdrop. I was specifically interested in the TSBackdrop utility, as it automatically displays items such as the Client Computer Name, Client IP address, Username and the Server which the Client is logged on to, on the user’s desktop background. This is great for Terminal and Citrix servers, and something that Bginfo lacks.

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