Throughout this article I will be focusing on virtual machines and data as part of your Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) environment, combined with the Nerdio Manager for WVD deployment – from an architectural point of view. This data may be stored on your VMs, in the form of user profiles, departmental and personal user data.
Continue ReadingInside Citrix: Web Interface & StoreFront — XML-based user authentication
Average time to read: 5 minutesInitially, with the introduction of StoreFront it relied solely on its authentication service for user authentication purposes. This, as you might be aware is different from Web Interface, which will directly contact one of the configured Delivery Controllers where the Broker/XML service will take over. Since Web Interface is still widely deployed and used in (large) production environments (and StoreFront now also supports XML based user authentication) I would like to talk, in a bit more detail about both authentication methods available today.
What’s new… Printing in Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp 7.9? A more in-depth look.
Average time to read: 6 minutesWhile there have been some major announcements at Synergy, like the Microsoft / Citrix pact including Azure, Office 356, Windows 10 VDI and more, some huge improvements to MCS regarding I/O storage optimizations, including MCS provisioning for the Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor, the Federated Authentication Service, which was also (very) well received, I’d like to focus on a few smaller enhancements. Though ‘small’ does not mean less important, au contraire – as the French would say.
E2EVC… The one in Lisbon. The XD 7.6 HA (im) possibilities – presentation video!
Average time to read: < 1 minuteA few moths ago, back in November 2015, Wilco van Bragt and I gave a presentation at E2EVC in Lisbon, Portugal. Our session was named: The XenDesktop 7.6 HA and Failover (im) possibilities, suggestions are welcome. We talked about some of the options we had (for example, Zones were not optional back then) in making our workloads highly available (Load Balancing included) using features and technologies like: StoreFront MultiSite configurations, Connection Leasing, Application groups and more. Next to that we also touched on some of the things still missing, at least according to our point of view. You can watch the full recording here.
Citrix NetScaler… The basics continued, part three. High Availability!
Average time to read: 5 minutesI think we are all familiar with the term High Availability, or HA in short. It simply means that if a single machine or system fails we will have another equally configured system, or multiple, in standby mode or actively participating a.k.a. active / active, ready to take over when needed. This way we won’t loose any of the functionality that the failing, or failed, machine was providing us with. Which in the case of the NetScaler could be anything from a Gateway to Load Balancing, SSL offloading, Content Switching and more. Needless to say that the Citrix NetScaler has some nifty build-in HA capabilities as well.
XenDesktop SQL High Availability… What to use?!
Average time to read: 7 minutes
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?