In the course of the last six months, I have published nine articles about performance monitoring, why it is a crucial task and how the different subsystems of the operating system. To wrap up this series, this article offers an overview of the topics covered in the individual articles as well as a summary of my recommendations.
Continue reading ‘Performance Monitoring Round-Up’
The Microsoft Remote Desktop Services Team has release a very intriguing article about Aero Glass Remoting with Windows Server 2008 R2. Being a tech guy, I have tested this on a development system and I must say that I am officially impressed.
In the last years, I joined the ranks of those migrating to Windows Vista and, later, to Windows 7 RC not only because it was the next incarnation of the Windows operating system but due to Aero which is part of the Home Premium (or higher) editions.
Continue reading ‘Who Needs Aero Glass Remoting? Although It’s Cool!’
In the first article of this series, I provided a short overview why performance monitoring is important, what subsystems are to be monitored and named some tools focussed on monitoring terminal servers.
Having been concerned with the performance analysis of terminal servers in many projects, I can draw some conclusions about terminal servers before diving deeper into the subject. I’d like to introduce two categories of terminal servers from a performance standpoint.
Continue reading ‘Performance Monitoring Part 2 – Terminal Servers’
We all know that it is trendy to use a profile solution to rid Windows of some shortcomings of roaming profiles. And quite a number of you have looked at Citrix Profile Management (also known as User Profile Manager). In its current incarnation, UPM is configured using a group policy specifying the profile path. But similar to utilizing the “Set path for TS Roaming Profiles” for Terminal Services (soon to be Remote Desktop Services), this introduces the limitation that all users logging on to a server receive the same profile path – most most likely with some dynamically substituted components like environment variables or, in the case of UPM, fields from the user object in Active Directory.
Unfortunately, both solutions (UPM and “Set path for TS Roaming Profiles”) are inferior to managing profile paths in Active Directory user objects. The latter enables administrators to distribute users across several servers or use components representing an organisational affiliation. Wouldn’t it be neat to combine those to methods of maintaining profile paths?
Continue reading ‘The Combined Strength of Citrix Profile Management and the Active Directory Terminal Services Profile Path’
In a previous article, I described how Windows XP and Server 2003 handle folder views, why those configured for network drives are lost upon logoff and how to correct this behaviour. The last article explained the new design for storing folder views introduced by Windows Vista and Server 2008. But it only hints at a solution using a profile management product and lacks a proper description how to achieve this. Fortunately, Citrix User Profile Manager (UPM) can be configured to resolve this issue which I will expand on in this article.
Continue reading ‘Fixing Folder Views on Vista/Server 2008 using Citrix UPM’
In one of my previous articles I explained how Windows handles folder views and how to preserve these settings for network shares when using roaming profiles across multiple machine. A reader has pointed me to the fact that the described behaviour seems to have changed beginning with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.
Continue reading ‘How Vista/Server 2008 Handle Folder Views’
I am proud to announce the availability of the user profile whitepaper for Citrix User Profile Manager (UPM) 2.0. It has been a lot of new and updated content to reflect the changes in UPM 2.0 compared to the Tech Preview. Continue reading ‘User Profile Whitepaper for Citrix User Profile Manager 2.0′
I have recently had the chance to write an article for a German journal called LANline. The article focuses on user profile management and why modern approaches of application delivery create the need for a user profile management solution.
The article can be read either in the printed issue published in October 2008 or online. Continue reading ‘The Necessity of Managing User Profiles’
I have already written about shadow keys in the past explaining the TermSrvCopyKeyOnce and how they are handled on Windows x64. So far, I have only provided descriptions of technical matters concerning shadow keys. Continue reading ‘Shadow Keys: A Relict from Ancient Times’
Lately, I have been working with Windows x64 a lot. I am under the impression that few are really aware of the behavioural changes introduced by the Windows-on-Windows 64 (WoW64) layer enabling 32-bit applications to run on Windows x64. Therefore, I attempt to expand on some of the peculiarities of WoW64 in this blog. Continue reading ‘Shadow Keys on Windows x64′
