In the past I have written numerous times about Citrix Insight Services, or TaaS before that, which stands for Tools as a Service (don’t be confused, Insight Services was just another name change from TaaS). Smart Check builds upon these services and offers (at least) the same type of pro-active checks (equal to Insight Services) keeping your XenApp and/or XenDesktop Site healthy at all times. However, it is important to note that Smart Check is a completely new service on its own, part of the Smart Tools portfolio (formerly known as Citrix Lifecycle Management Services), which are a 100% Citrix cloud based, though they can be applied on-premises as well. This post is meant to provide you with all relevant information on Smart Check available today as well as any future developments going forward.
Citrix Call-Home, a potential successor for Scout — here is what you need to know
Citrix Call Home according to the e-docs pages “Call Home collects diagnostic data and then periodically uploads telemetry packages containing that data directly to Citrix Insight Services for analysis and troubleshooting”. A nice summary, but of course there is a bit more to it. Below I have put together a brief ‘did you know that’ overview, a somewhat different format then what you are used here on basvankaam.com — let me know what you think.
Liquidwarelabs ProfileUnity & FlexApps overview. Version 6.5 soon to be released!
Last week Jason E Smith, who is the Global Director of User Management and Performance Solutions within Liquidwarelabs, showed and told me a thing or two about ProfileUnity, their User Environment Manager, including their application layering a.k.a. FlexApp solution. They are on the verge of releasing ProfileUnity / FlexApp version 6.5 (as of early October) which currently holds the status of Release Candidate 1, which is the one Jason showed me.
My version of why the pen is mightier than the keyboard!
Little over two years ago I singed up to WordPress.com, bought my own personal domain basvankaam.com and just started writing. The main thought behind all this was to create some sort of online (personal) knowledge base and to learn about new and existing technologies and products as I progressed, primarily focusing on the Citrix portfolio. Over time I’ve learned that sharing what I know, or have learned, with others is probably one of the main reasons I kept, and keep, doing what I do. It’s fun, educational (in many ways) and very rewarding at the same time. Although at first I never expected it to turn out the way it has done today, something for which I can only be thankful. But don’t worry, that’s not what I wanted to talk about throughout this article.
Control, or control not. There is no manage! Free VMworld Europe tickets!
What a great title for a blog post, don’t you agree? To bad I didn’t came up with it myself, my friends at VMTurbo did. You’ve probably heard of them, they are the ones that enable virtualization teams to control complex environments and at the same time enhance the performance of VMware, Hyper-V, RHEV and Citrix orientated architectures and deployments. The reason for this blog is twofold, first of all I would like to spend a few minutes briefly introducing VMTurbo, and secondly, as some of you might already know, they love to give a way free stuff, and I’m not talking about a baseball cap or a T-shirt, read on …