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Remote Desktop Services in Windows 2008 R2 – Part 3 – RD Web Access & RemoteApp

Posted by George Khalil in Windows 2008 R2 on Nov 23rd, 2009 | 0 Comments

Welcome back to the 3rd and final article in this series in installing and configuring your Remote Desktop Services in Windows 2008 R2, with the focus of today’s article around Remote Desktop (RD) Web Services (formerly referred to as TS Web Services) and utilising RemoteApp to publish applications to our RD Web Access web page and to the client desktop. For those that missed the previous 2 articles, you can access these from the links below; Remote Desktop Services in Windows 2008 R2 -Part 1 – Installation Remote Desktop Services in Windows 2008 R2 – Part 2 – RD Gateway RD Web Access is a...

Remote Desktop Services in Windows 2008 R2 – Part 2 – RD Gateway

Posted by George Khalil in Windows 2008 R2 on Nov 16th, 2009 | 0 Comments

Welcome to the second article in this series on Remote Desktop Services in Windows 2008 R2. We were first introduced to the Remote Desktop (RD) Gateway in the first release of Windows 2008 and as previously mentioned in part 1 of this series, the RD Gateway was formerly known as Terminal Server (TS) Gateway. TS Gateway opened up Remote Access barriers providing access to our Terminal Servers via SSL or port 443, as opposed to the conventional “legacy” VPN access through either IPSEC or L2TP. In Windows Server 2008 R2, not much has changed and in today’s article I will provide you with a step...

Remote Desktop Services in Windows 2008 R2 -Part 1

Posted by George Khalil in Windows 2008 R2 on Nov 12th, 2009 | 0 Comments

Windows Terminal Services has come a long way since its infancy and has improved with every version of Windows, and Windows 2008 R2 is no exception. There are even noticeable differences between Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 and should be highly considered as a worthy upgrade for those currently running older versions of the Windows component. I first began working with Terminal Server technologies back in the day of WinFrame which was a “special” version of Windows NT 3.5.1 that was developed by Citrix. Since then I have worked with all versions of Terminal Server from NT4 to the most...

How to setup XP Mode on Windows 7

Posted by George Khalil in Virtualisation, Windows 7 on Oct 27th, 2009 | 0 Comments

Windows 7 was just recently released to the General Public and has been in the hands of TechNet and MSDN subscribers for a while before that, and one of the features that I have been utilising lately is “XP Mode” which is a glorified version of Virtual PC as we have known it in previous releases. Windows Virtual PC for Windows 7 (not to be confused with Windows Virtual PC 2007) is actually one of two pre-requisites for XP mode with the other being “Hardware-assisted virtualization (HAV)”. HAV are processors with the Intel VT, AMD-V or VIA VT feature which will need to be enabled in the...

Windows Deployment Services, WAIK & Windows 7 – Part 4/4

Posted by George Khalil in Windows, Windows 2008 R2, Windows 7 on Oct 1st, 2009 | 0 Comments

Welcome to the final article in this series on Windows Deployment Services, WAIK and Windows 7. Our first articled introduced WDS and its configuration with parts 2 and 3 focusing on our beloved WAIK tool and Windows System Image Manager and the creation of our XML answer files. We conclude the series by introducing one of the enhanced features in WDS and Windows 2008 and that’s the ability to inject driver packages and have them deployed to our client computers along with the install image. Note that this functionality is only available when you are installing images of the following...

Windows Deployment Services, WAIK & Windows 7 – Part 3/4

Posted by George Khalil in Windows, Windows 2008 R2, Windows 7 on Sep 22nd, 2009 | 0 Comments

We are back again and in today’s article we will continue our efforts in automating our Windows 7 deployment via Windows Deployment Services utilising the WAIK tool and the creation of our XML Answer files. In Part 2 of this series we focused on the creation of the WDSUnattend.xml file that is required to automate the Windows Pre Execution Boot for our WDS clients and took care of the partitioning of our disks. If you missed part 2 of this series, you can access it here. Today we continue our efforts in utilising the Windows System Image Manager (WSIM) to create our ImageUnattend.xml which will...

Windows Deployment Services, WAIK & Windows 7 – Part 2/4

Posted by George Khalil in Windows, Windows 2008 R2, Windows 7 on Sep 16th, 2009 | 0 Comments

Welcome back to the second part of this series and in the next 2 article’s I will be focusing our efforts on creating the necessary xml answer files to automate the deployment of our Windows 7 image via Windows Deployment Services (WDS). In part 1, I provided you with step by step instructions on installing and configuring your WDS role on your Windows 2008 R2 machine. If you missed it, you can access part 1 here. Our focus in today’s article revolves around the creation of the WDSUnattend.xml file that is required to automate the Windows Pre Execution Boot for WDS clients. Our tool of...

Windows Deployment Services, WAIK & Windows 7 – Part 1/4

Posted by George Khalil in Windows, Windows 2008 R2, Windows 7 on Sep 10th, 2009 | 0 Comments

I have been known to be at the cutting edge of technology, early adoption of Microsoft technologies is a must and this time round nothing is going to change. I first played with Windows Deployment Services (WDS) back in the day when it was referred to as Remote Installation Services (RIS) and had first exposure to the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) back when it was in beta and so was Vista at the time. I took the plunge and deployed Windows Vista using Light Touch deployment via WDS and the WAIK a month after Vista was released to the enterprise and today I will be providing you with...

Introducing your first Windows 2008 R2 Domain Controller

Posted by George Khalil in Windows, Windows 2008 R2 on Aug 26th, 2009 | 0 Comments

Windows 2008 R2 has only been out for over a week however I have decided to introduce my first Windows 2008 R2 domain controller (DC) almost immediately into an existing Windows 2008 Active Directory (AD) Domain to eventually have a complete R2 forest functional level to benefit from some of the new R2 features. For a seasoned IT Pro, introducing new domain controllers is fairly straightforward, however I have decided to provide you with a step by step guide on doing so and the pre-work that is required, so let’s begin! Now before we delve into the step by step guide I thought I would begin by...

Stream media from your SharePoint Site with Windows 2008 Media Services

Posted by George Khalil in SharePoint, SharePoint 2007, Windows on May 22nd, 2009 | 0 Comments

Wouldn’t it be great if you could deliver digital media content including Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV) from your SharePoint site without buffering issues and poor viewing experience. We must admit that SharePoint itself isn’t great in handling and storing digital media in particular large Video files and we can blame SQL for that! Even though you can host WMV’s in document libraries just like any other file, features such as fast streaming capabilities effectively eliminating buffering time, and reducing the likelihood of playback interruptions due to network...