In versions prior to 6.0 VMware supplied the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) as an OVF template that could be imported directly.

Starting with version 6.0 the installation process has changed and now consist of an .iso file containing a custom, HTML based, installer. Vladan Seget has a nice blog post where he describes the installation.

This installation process is annoying, it needs a separate client (Windows) machine to run the installer on, requires the Client Integration Plugin (which doesn’t appear to run well on chrome now that support for npapi/dpapi has been removed):

But even worse is that we cannot import VCSA 6.0 in vCloud Director. Even converting the OVF inside the iso file doesn’t help because vCloud directory lacks support for Deployment Options.

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I’m using Windows 10 with BootCamp on my MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015). Overall I’m pretty happy with the hardware but Apple seems to limit functionality when running under Windows.

A good example is the trackpad which simply doesn’t operate as smoothly as under Mac OSX. This isn’t because Windows is a less good Operating System, it’s simply Apple supplying drivers and support software this is less good.

For the trackpad I found a good solution with Trackpad++ which enables 2, 3- and 4-finger gestures and improves scrolling.

The AMD Display Drivers as supplied with BootCamp are instable leading to “Display driver stopped responding” messages.

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The Citrix ShareFile Sync application is quite limited in functionality, one of those limitations is that you can only synchronize to a single (one) local folder.

As Helge Klein wrote in his excellent article "Configuring Citrix ShareFile Sync from PowerShell" this is simply a GUI restriction and not a restriction in the actual ShareFile sync engine.

Helge describes that you can easily do this in PowerShell with the following example:

While the command was accepted, nothing was synchronized.

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Twitter has opened access to Analytics for all users. However when you use an Ad Blocker, like Adblock Plus, you’ll get the following error:

For Adblock Plus you can fix this by adding a filter: go to Filter Preferences and on the "Custom filters" tab add a new filter within a filter group (or create a filter group for this rule).

Use this as a filter rule:

@@||ads.twitter.com/stylesheets/ads-allow.css

And don’t forget to Enable the rule!

EDIT: Twitter user @Ertraeglichkeit mentioned a different method:

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This morning Aaron Parker was wondering if Hash Tables could be used to work with ini files:

I thought it was a great idea because in Hash Tables you can use the . operator to get or set a Hash Table entry. But I wondered what to do with sections in ini files. Then I got the idea to use nested Hash Tables for that.

The result is two functions, one to read an ini file into a nested Hash Table and one function to write it back to an ini file.

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In a PowerShell script I needed to sort a hash table by byte value (not alphabetically, lowercase parameters will be listed after uppercase ones). An example for this requirement is the Amazon Product Advertising API.

Consider the following hashtable as an example:

If we use the Sort-Object to order the list (note that we need to use the GetEnumerator method):

We will get the following result:

If you use the -CaseSensitive switch the resulting order will remain the same.

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To get the best performance out of Virtual Desktops it is essential that the power configuration in the system BIOS and the HyperVisor are configured for maximum performance.

Many people have blogged about the importance of these settings like, Andrew Wood, Helge Klein and Didier Van Hoye. So I will not go into details again.

But how do you check from a Virtual Machine if you are actually running at full clock speed or not?

I have written a PowerShell script to do just that (requires at least PowerShell v3).

Here are some screenshots:

Running with "High Performance profile":

Running with "Balanced" power profile:

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In a SCOM Management Pack Custom Properties can be used for Alert Description and Notification as described in this blog by Kevin Holman.

In my case I wanted to add the Display Name and the Performance Counter Value in a Performance Threshold Monitor. In XML it would look this this:

But how to add these parameters when using the System Center 2012 Visual Studio Authoring Extensions?

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I am currently implementing Sophos UTM and I quite like this solution. It is free up for home usage and can easily be installed on a hypervisor.

I wanted to scan encrypted traffic (ssl) as well so I activated the "Decrypt and scan" option:

When testing this on one of my iPad’s I noticed that the App Store didn’t work properly anymore.

When I tried to update applications I got the following error: "Cannot connect to iTunes Store". Additionally when I searched for Apps the search would return no results.

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Today I encounterd what seems to be a bug in the System Center 2012 Visual Studio Authoring Extensions. I wanted to define a Performance Collection Rule that reads out the percentage of free memory from an SNMP device.

Since the device returns only the percentage of used memory I needed to use the ComputedPerfProvider provider to substract the used memory percentage from 100.

I could of course report used memory instead of free memory but I wanted the resulst to appear in the default SCOM Performance View, which only lists Free Memory:

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