When dealing with multiple datacenters, spread over multiple sites or continents even, you are faced with a couple of challenges. For one, you do not want to manage your desktops and/or applications on a per site or datacenter basis. Neither do you want your users in, let’s say New York to connect up to a desktop somewhere in Europe, in most cases anyway. And if you do, you would like to have full control when it comes to assigning desktops and/or applications — or entitlements as VMware likes to call them. Flexibility is key. This is where VMware’s Cloud Pod Architecture can help.
Continue Reading
E2EVC… The one in Lisbon. The XD 7.6 HA (im) possibilities – presentation video!
A 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.
Installing and configuring Citrix StoreFront, the web.config file!
Not to long ago StoreFront replaced WebInterface (yes, it’s still officially supported till June 2015) and with it came a bunch of cool new and (very) useful features like Receiver for web and StoreFront multi site configurations for example, offering load balancing and HA capabilities, user mapping, application subscription synchronisation, optimal NetScaler Gateway routing and a few more. Also, we are no longer bound to an external database, this is now taken care of by the build-in Windows Extensible Storage Engine. The downside, at least for me, is that most, but not all, of these features need to be configured and or modified in the web.config file, comparable to the WebInterface.conf file we have with WebInterface.