BriForum Boston 2014

This week Brian and Gabe announced the sessions for both BriForums (London/US). I am happy to announce I will be presenting two sessions in Boston and will almost certainly attend BriForum London as a regular peasant.

If you did not read the list of sessions, here is what I am presenting and why I think these will be useful and what the plan is regarding delivering them.

SBC Round Up 2014. I really like doing these. Plan is to go through the installation and testing of several RDS add-ons (i.e ProPalms TSE, Dell vWorkspace, 2X, etc) and see how the compare to each other and of course to RDS 2012 R2 by itself. What will change this year is I am actually recording all the installations and will post all videos as soon as BriForum Boston is over. Also creating individual PDFs for each product installation so at the end you will get an end-to-end guide on how to install every single major product out there. Neat.

RDS-O-Matic. This is basic the end-result of dealing with RDS installs almost on a daily basis for customers around the globe. The idea was to come up with an automated way to create all the PowerShell commands to deploy a full RDS 2012 R2 from scratch. For BriForum it will be able to perform the following tasks:

– Hyper-V only. Creates all the required VMs based on a sysprep’ed VHD. Of course this requires minimum services to be up and running already like your AD, your Hyper-V hosts, the clustering, etc. But if these are there you simply select the VHD you want and it will copy to all the required VMs, mount them, inject the Unattended.xml file and finalize the setup (add to domain, set IP, add to proper OU). This is optional (meaning if you do have all VMs ready to roll you can opt this step out). Yes before you bitch I have no love for VMware ESXi anymore.
– NLB. For every component that needs NLB you will be able to choose if you want it done for you (i.e. RD Gateway). It will create the VIP, add the ports, etc.
– UPD. If you want to enable the User Profile Disk on the deployment.
– Whole deployment. Of course it does that. Sets up the connection brokers, web access, gateway, session hosts, etc. The whole deal.
– SQL Bullshit. Ideally I will try to automate the turd Microsoft created when setting up the SQL for the Connection Brokers HA. It is a PITA (create folder on the SQL, create database, add proper security, etc – amazing how every other product on the market can do this but NOTMicrosoft).

The main plan is to turn all this into a web service that anyone can hit, enter the information and get a text file ready to use for the whole deployment. Later iOS and Android apps so you can do that anywhere/anytime/offline.

And for the first time in 10 years of BriForum for me, I will be actually driving to Boston this time what may actually be faster than flying, assuming the cops do not stop me in Maine. Feel free to stop me and say ‘Hi’ if you see me around at BriForum. I will be driving ‘Ferrucio’ (yes, my kids name all the cars we have at home).

Cheers.

CR

Quelle: BriForum Boston 2014 | WTSLab’s CEO Blog.