In this article, I want to show you how easy it is to create a new Active Directory domain for demo environments. If you want something for production, there are some additional steps to take, but I won’t cover that here.

You can use Azure DSC for many configurations, like setting up a domain controller, as I will show here. It is also possible to install Windows Roles and Feature and create your own resources to install and configure software. If you want to read more about Azure DSC, you can go here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/extensions/dsc-overview  If you want to know more about DSC in general, you can read about it here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/dsc/getting-started/wingettingstarted?view=powershell-7.1

In this post, I want to provide an overview of Citrix’s enhancements to their Virtual Apps and Desktops Cloud service (CVADS) through 2020 that I feel is significant.

Citrix introduced vertical load balancing in January, meaning that each Virtual Apps VM will be filled to max load before the next VM is used. This ensures that the cost customers might have in a public cloud can be reduced since fewer machines should be turned on. This feature, of course, is only for starting up. Shutting down VMs is still depending on users logging off, so the entire VM is empty. Another small feature from January was the restart delay timer. This feature is only useful if Citrix has an outage since the functionality is to retry restarting in a period if the control plane is down for some reason.

Hi all,

In this blog series, I want to take you through the process of setting up Azure DevOps and using source control to provision and maintain a virtual server environment in Microsoft Azure. The technique used here can just as well apply to any other cloud or on-premises environment.

The reason I am putting together is that I have found lots of material online about the subject, but I haven’t found any useful guides that explain the process from start to end. If you read this guide and find anything I can do better or something I have missed, please let me know so that I can update the guide and make it better.

Hi all,

In this second part of the blog series, I want to focus in on Azure Boards and my use of it.

In short Azure Boards is where I have all my notes for the project I am currently doing. I will describe the items I use when doing projects, but I won’t get into all the things you can use Azure Boards to do. Using Azure Boards also helps out a lot when more people are working together on the same project. It will be easy to assign a task to yourself or a coworker and then mark as “Done” when the work is complete.

In this part of the series, I want to focus on the use of repositories. Repositories are where your code is stored, and in my case, this is often PowerShell code as I will also show in this series.

Also, a part of repositories is the actual source control of your code, there are branches and pull requests. I will show how I am using this, and remember that I am an Ops consultant, so maybe developers are doing this very differently, but this seems to work for me at least.