Citrix Summit 2014 in Orlando Florida is approaching fast. Just a few more weeks before the Welcome Reception, including the Solutions Expo, at the Hyatt Regency (Regency Ballroom) officially kicks off next years Summit event. Since I don’t like last minute arrangements I took some time to figure out what I need to take with me, MacBook, paper notebook, clothing (I’m counting on 80F, around 26 celsius, average :-) hotel voucher, tickets, passport etc… stuff like that. About a month ago I also figured out my conference schedule, the opening key-note, multiple break-out sessions, the Expo, perhaps a walk-in hands-on session and I also scheduled the 1Y0-400 exam to, hopefully, earn my CCE-AD certification. See my full schedule further on, I fine tuned it last week.
Archives for December 2013
XenDesktop SQL High Availability… What to use?!
The XenDesktop Site Configuration Database is an important part of your infrastructure, when it’s is down, users won’t be able to connect and IT won’t be able to make any configuration changes. Because of this you’ll probably want to implement some kind of high availability mechanism keeping your database up and running at all times, or at least to try and keep downtime at a minimum. During one of my recent presentations in which I talked about XD7 including it’s database dependency, a discussion around which type of (SQL) HA mechanism we should implement quickly formed… What options do we have?
Desktop as a Service a.k.a. DaaS
This article was originally written as a guest blogger for Intense School IT educational services. During the past few weeks I repeatedly talk about virtual desktop infrastructures (XenDesktop, VDI-in-a-Box), some of the technology involved, features and probably the most important one, use cases. Especially with Windows XP coming to an end, see my previous article on this, this might be a good time to rethink your alternatives when it comes to replacing your (fat) client infrastructure and the accompanying back-end systems that come with it. That being said, there’s another concept I’d like to discuss since it’s closely related to VDI and could prove to be a valid solution for a great deal of use cases out there, especially when it comes to small(er) and mid sized companies. I’m referring to DaaS, or, Desktop as a Service in full.
Configure StoreFront Multi-Site configurations
StoreFront Multi-Site configurations are still fairly unknown. I guess this has something to do with XenDesktop 7 still being relatively new (I know, it’s actually a StoreFront 2.0 feature) and with this I mean, the addition of the XenApp functionality. Since zones are no longer part of XenDesktop 7, or the Flex Management Architecture (they’ve disappeared together with the Local Host cache) you’ll have to, in most cases, create separate Sites to achieve similar results. Especially if Sites are geographically separated. When using StoreFront Multi-Site configurations we can still add in load balance and failover capabilities, even when using geographically ‘Dispersed’ Sites, just like we are (or were) used to with zones. No NetScaler required, although it’s probably a good idea to implement one anyway.