A couple of weeks ago I launched the first ever ‘The state of public cloud services – the 2016 community edition’ online survey. It included a short textual introduction followed by 35 questions in total and a few fun ‘quotes’ in between. While it turned out to be a bit more work then I anticipated beforehand, I am very satisfied with the final outcome. Below you will find the final report in a .PDF format, free for everyone to download.
Microsoft’s Windows XP is hot! Read why.
This article was originally written as a guest blogger for intense School IT educational services. This may sound a bit weird to some, but Microsoft’s Windows XP is hot! Perhaps not as hot as it was when it was first released, but it’s not far of. Unfortunately not in a good way. Next year, in April 2014 to be exact, Microsoft Windows XP will no longer be officially supported. During this article I’d like to explore the end of life concept, what we can do to prevent potential issues and have a look at some of the possible migration and or upgrade scenarios we have at our disposal. Is it time to dump those fat clients? Adopt VDI? DaaS or Hosted Shared Desktops perhaps? Let’s see what’s out there.
Upgrade and or migrate to XD7… What’s involved?!
Although Citrix has done an excellent job describing both the upgrade and migration process on their E-Docs website, I still feel it’s a subject that somehow needs to be part of my Blog series on XD7 as well. And since I did the same for the XenApp upgrade and migration tools out there it just wouldn’t be fair now would it?! Citrix already announced that, at the moment, there are no upgrade or migration paths available for existing XenApp customers. They are however working on a toolset, including a bunch of scripts, to assist customers in their migration from XenApp 6.5 to XenDesktop 7, which will be included in one of the future releases. Let’s get started, I’ll try and keep it short :-)
End of Life… to Migrate or not to Migrate?
What if you want to merge four separate XenApp 6.0 Farms into one and upgrade to 6.5 along the way? Just one of many challenges at work :-) This made me think about some of the possible migration and upgrade scenario’s out there. With Excalibur on the horizon and multiple ‘End of Life’ dates passed (can be found on the Citrix Product Matrix, give it a Google) I guess there won’t be many admins migrating their 4.5 / 5.0 Farms to 6.0. I mean, why would they? 6.0 isn’t that different from 6.5 and we all know an even newer version will be released shortly. I know… there are some distinct differences between the two and I can also think of several reasons on why not to migrate, but you get my point right?!