One of our customers asked us to provide a proof of concept Windows 8 virtual desktop running on their current Quest Desktop Virtualisation installation. They are currently running a fully patched 7.6 version of this product.

At the time of writing this post Quest Desktop Virtualisation experimental support Windows 8 so this is purely an experiment to see what works and what does not.

The customer currently runs their VDI estate on Microsoft Hyper-v server 2008 and utilise Hyper-cache and hyper-deploy both features of the product which you can find out more information on here and here.

Installing a master vanilla Windows 8 system on the master hyper-v server posed the initial problem that windows 8 is not a supported Operating system on Windows Server 2008 so the hyper-v tools would not be available should we need them, as this is an experiment we continued on with the process. The installation of Windows 8 on the virtual machine completed without issue and we had a working virtual desktop. We enabled remote access to the desktop and our initial test was to see if we could connect to the guest via standard RDP. This worked as expected. Installing office 2010, forefront antivirus and silverlight we created our base template.

We cloned the base template to a new virtual machine and proceeded to install the Quest PNtools onto the system, as before this process seemed to complete without incident. We then installed the Instant provisioning tools. After doing this we followed the standard mechanisms to import the desktop into the brokers, created the sysprep configuration(we did select the windows 7 options ) and then deployed some guests. again the quest tool impressed us with the speed it has deploying new desktops. from deploy to being able to login was close to 2 minutes.

Using standard 7.6 connectors we were able to connect to the guests and open word, office, etc.. the only issue I had was that Office 2010 seems to “Crash’ and causes the RDP session to reconnect.

So from an initial experiment without major tweaks we were able to get Windows 8 running and working. We are onsite with this customer for a while still doing other VMware migration work for them and so I will continue to use this new desktop and see if it is actually useable as a corporate VDI desktop.

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Recently I was told one of our customers was going to skip Windows 7 and Office 2010 and migrate directly to Windows 8 and Office 2013, this prompted me to take a general look at Windows 8. As with most of the other people in the IT world Windows 8 has been a big discussion point here at Red Armour both within our own ranks but also with some of our customers and their IT departments.

The message we have been getting from the people we have spoken to is that Windows 8 is going to be the next Windows ME or Vista for that matter. The IT press has also jumped on the bandwagon with as many words and paragraphs in for articles as there are in the against articles. From initial investigation it seems that Windows 8 will be a great tablet operating system that will allow many people who are looking for a Windows tablet to achieve their dream. The only stumbling block that they will have to overcome is the new interface as it takes getting used to.

As a desktop operating system however I fear this new interface is going to be a big drawback in its adoption, in some of the customers we support there are many staff members who found the migration to windows XP a challenge and then when they went to managed desktops it was as much of a challenge to get everyone happy with how things worked. Migrating to Windows 8 is going to create more headaches for the training and health and safety departments both in the way the new interface has changed and also with the amount of mouse movement is needed to get things done. The “lack” of the ability to “alt TAB” between your running programs is also going to pose a challenge and put people off who work in say Microsoft Word and Excel as to change between them you need to move your hand to your mouse and then use the mouse to find the open document.

Getting back to the heading of this post I believe that IT departments should wait before deploying Windows 8 until the vendors they use have all caught up and fully support it and that includes Microsoft products. Those with outdated applications that used to run fine on Windows XP or worked ok on Windows 7 with tweaks should look at what the vendor has planned to support Windows 8 most of these vendors will require an upgrade to their software which could increase the cost of the Windows 8 rollout project, and those old legacy programs well you will have to use a third party tool or service to accomplish the provisioning of that application.

More posts will be made on this topic as we more and more of our customers evaluate and deploy Windows 8  and we hope to bring you some “How To” posts to help you have an easier time deploying Windows 8 when it is your turn.

Of course you could just contact us and we could come and help you deploy it.

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