Update

On November 22, 2017, Ajay Patel (Senior Vice President, Product Development, Cloud Services, VMware) published a blog post in reaction to Microsofts announcement (VMware – The Platform of Choice in the Cloud). Especially these statements are interesting:

No VMware-certified partner names have been mentioned nor have any partners collaborated with VMware in engineering this offering. This offering has been developed independent of VMware, and is neither certified nor supported by VMware.

Last friday I passed the 1Y0-351 (Citrix NetScaler 10.5 Essentails and Networking) exam with a pretty good score. The exam was necessary, not only because I will do much more NetScaler projects in the future, but also because Citrix has made it mandatory to have a CCP-N in your company to to sell Citrix NetScaler.

Preparation

My employer booked me a 5-day course (CNS-220 Citrix NetScaler Essentials and Traffic Management). Very nice, although I already had experience with NetScaler deployments. This training was designed for NetScaler 12.0, not for 10.5.

In the last months I came across several customers that were in the process to evaluate, or to deploy Office 365. It usually started with a Office 365 trial, that some of the IT guys started to play around with. Weeks or months later, during the proof-of-concept or during the final deployment, the customer had to choose a Office 365 tenant name. That is the part before .onmicrosoft.com.

I have wrote about the installation of PowerShell Core in Linux Mint 18 yesterday. Today, I want to show you, how to install Visual Studio Code on Linux Mint 18. The installation is really easy:

1. Download the deb package
2. Install the deb package
3. Run Visual Studio Code

You can download the latest packages for Windows, Linux (deb and rpm, if you want even a tar ball), and Mac on the Visual Studio Code download page. Download the deb file. To install the package, open a Terminal window and run dpkg .

Beside my Lenovo X250, which is my primary working machine, I’m using a HP ProBook 6450b. This was my primary working machine from 2010 until 2013. With a 128 GB SSD, 8 GB RAM and the Intel i5 M 450 CPU, it is still a pretty usable machine. I used it mainly during projects, when I needed a second laptop (or the PC Express card with the serial port…). It was running Windows 10, until I decided to try Linux MInt. I used Linux as my primary desktop OS more than a decade ago. It was quite productive, but especially with laptops, there were many things that does not worked out of the box.

Note: I trashed this blog post several times. But I would like to express my point of view (hey, this is my blog. :D )

Some weeks back, I had an interesting discussion with a HR consultant. Bottom line: You ruin your career, if you stay for more than 3 years at the same company. IMHO this is bullshit.

I have started my IT career, right after school, with an apprenticeship at a local IT company. I finished this apprenticeship three years later, and my employer offered me a position as IT-Technician. Until 2004, I changed my employer three times. There were good reasons for each change. I learned pretty much in these years. The last change took me to my current employer. I have started as a Technical Consultant in October 2004. Today, thirteen years later, I’m leading the consulting and services business unit. There is a good chance I will not leave this company until retirement. At least not for the same or similar job role.

Open network ports in offices, waiting rooms and entrance halls make me curious. Sometimes I  want to plugin a network cable, just to see if I get an IP address. I know many companies that does not care about network access control. Anybody can plugin any device to the network. When talking with customers about network access control, or port security, I often hear their complains about complexity. It’s too complex to implement, to hard to administrate. But it is not sooo complex. In the easiest setup (with mac authentication), you need a switch, that can act as authenticator, and a authentication server. But IEEE 802.1x is not much more complicated.

Starting with release 11.1, NetScaler ADC offers an easy way to redirect traffic from HTTP to HTTPS within the configuration of a load-balanced vServer. With 11.1, Citrix introduced the paramter  -redirectFromPort and -redirectURL.

While playing with a NetScaler ADC in my lab, I discovered a strange error message as I tried to configure the redirect.

Internal vserver couldn’t be set?! Okay, there was already a vServer, that was listening on port 80. After removing the vServer, I was able to setup the redirection and it was working as expected.

Last month, I wrote about a very annoying issue, that I discovered during a Windows 10 VDI deployment: Roaming of the AppData\Local folder breaks the Start Menu of Windows 10 Enterprise (Roaming of AppData\Local breaks Windows 10 Start Menu). During research, I stumbled over dozens of threads about this issue.

Today, after hours and hours of testing, troubleshooting and reading, I might have found a solution.

The environment

Currently I don’t know if this is a workaround, a weird hack, or no solution at all. Maybe it was luck that none of my 2074203423 logins at different linked-clones resulted in a broken start menu. The customer is running:

Disclaimer: The information from this blog post is provided on an “AS IS” basis, without warranties, both express and implied.

Last week, I had an interesting discussion with a customer. Some months back, the customer has decided to kick-off a PoC for a VMware Horizon View based virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). He is currently using fat-clients with Windows 8.1, and the new environment should run on Windows 10 Enterprise. Last week, we discussed the idea of using Windows Server 2012 R2 as desktop OS.