Weblog Sander Wilmink

Yesterday me and a colleague were busy implementing RES Powerfuse 2008 SR7 at one of our projects. We experienced a extremely slow logon when users were connecting to the RES Powerfuse Desktop within Citrix XenApp 5.0 on Windows Server 2003 x86. During the logon of a user the process of connecting to a domain controller took the most time. In the beginning it took about 10 minutes to continue with building up the session. An overview of the situation:

As test we disabled the Read-Only Domain Controller services, because we noticed that the slowness started at the phase of initialization of the domain information. We found out that the logon time was fast and as it should be. We checked the properties of the session and noticed that the session was connected to the Domain Controller in the Datacenter.
With these results we went to RES Software and they told us that there was already another company with the same issues with a Read-Only Domain Controller. They sent us a patch which resulted in a logon time of 2 minutes. A small improvement, but we have asked RES Software to research the issue and they expect to have a complete fix within 10 days.

As soon as we have the update we will let you know.

Microsoft now offers a certification exam for MDOP.  The Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist Exam 70-656: Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, Configuring covers topics such as:

• Configuring Group Policy Objects (GPOs) by Using Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM)
• Monitoring Desktops by Using Microsoft Desktop Error Monitoring (DEM)
• Managing Software Inventory by Using the Asset Inventory Service (AIS)
• Repairing and Diagnosing Computer Systems by Using the Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT)
• Configuring Application Virtualization Servers
• Configuring Application Virtualization clients
• Deploying and Managing the Application Virtualization Sequencer

You can find more information about this exam here.

Here a message from the App-V blog from Microsoft:

We recently noted some of the changes to support for ConfigMgr 2007 over on our support team blog but I wanted to also mention one big App-V 4.6 related change here:

Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.6 is now supported on ConfigMgr 2007 R2 with ConfigMgr 2007 SP2 

System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 with System Center Configuration Manager 2007 SP2 now supports Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.6 Desktop Client and Client for Remote Desktop Services. This client release enables support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and support for 64-bit operating systems. 

No software updates are required.

Enjoy!

A bit off-topic, but might be useful for some of you. Immidio also has some freeware tools available from the Immidio website. Recently two were added:

• ActiveApp Scanner – Monitor which applications are actually used during a user’s Windows session and collect information about the user environment, like keyboard, regional settings, network mappings and connected printers.
• Virtual Battery Indicator – Displays the battery level of your local laptop battery inside a Remote Desktop session, and provides a warning when the level drops below a certain value.

Download from www.immidio.com/resourcekit

Proudly I can announce that the version of WordPress is upgraded from version 2.9.1 to 2.9.2!

For a detailed explanation of the upgrade, please follow this link.