Ever since Citrix acquired Zenprise and officially launched Citrix XenMobile it has been under constant development. Not to long ago Citrix announced version 8.6.1 (adding in PIN based authentication, multi domain and Site support, single join functionality and more) and I’m sure it won’t be long before we’ll see another version increment. BYOD has always been a hard concept to ‘get’ and manage and over the pas few years (it’s still relatively new) we’ve seen multiple vendors offer their ‘solution’ to take on the challenge. Since Citrix XenMobile is still considered as one of the leading parties, and probably will be for years to come, I though it would be a good idea to sum up some of its most important features.
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.
A closer look at the Cloud, based on Server 2012 R2
This article was originally written as a guest blogger for intense School IT educational services. Let’s continue where we left off. Windows server 2012 R2 has been available as a tech preview download as of June 2013 and was officially released on October 18, 2013, together with Windows 8.1. It’s now more enterprise-class, application-focused and cloud-oriented than ever. High-performance multi-tenant storage, software-defined networking, and multiple VDI and RDP enhancements are some of the new and improved technologies that have been included in the R2 release.
The Citrix CloudGateway
Cloud computing… A bunch of computing resources delivering some kind of service over the network, typically being the Internet. It includes, or should include, on demand self-service capabilities like: requesting access to certain applications and data, automated account provisioning or perhaps the ability to manage your own VM’s. It’s hot and everybody wants a piece! Services like Google Apps, Amazon cloud drive and Microsoft’s Azure, to name a few, are examples that do just that. These are the cloud solutions often referred to when the Cloud hype gets mentioned. But what about an on-premises solution, building your own private cloud which can be safely accessed from anywhere?!