Throughout my time at Liquidware Stratusphere UX was always one of the favorites, during customer visits, demo’s, tech sessions, you name it. Not really surprising, since detailed insights into what’s happening from a technical as well as user perspective is a very important part of the end user experience and ongoing (never ending, it seems) management puzzle. This applies to on-premises as much as it does to various cloud environments, never mind which one.
Windows applications still rule the universe, on-premises SBC/VDI deployments are still king, cloud on the rise
Last month (May 2018) Login VSI and Frame presented the results of their State of the VDI and SBC union world-wide survey – the 2018 edition. Mark Plettenberg (Product Manager at Login VSI) and Ruben Spruijt (CTO at Frame) have put together a 66-page document holding all kinds of interesting VDI and SBC related statistics. The survey was completed by 755 people worldwide – go here to download your own copy. I went through the report and picked out a couple of subjects which are currently of most interest, or to me anyway.
Synergy 2018: Per-user Outlook search indexing and OST caching options. What was announced? High level cheat sheet included.
During Citrix Synergy a ton of new and exciting announcements were made. I wasn’t there to witness it myself but luckily, I was able to enjoy the Keynote (amongst other sessions and announcements) from a sunny and warm terrace (cold beers included) since the weather here in the Netherlands was some of the best we’ve seen in a long time. Of course, the 9-hour time difference also helped.
Focus on Citrix (or VMware, or Microsoft) – not printing!
I’ve always had a big interest in printing. It’s something I have written about and presented on extensively in the past. Throughout the years I have had my fair share of failure when it comes to printing in Citrix/RDSH/VDI based environments (who hasn’t?) so I decided to dig in a bit deeper. Not too long ago I got introduced to Tricerat, a very simple, yet effective and efficient solution when it comes to taking care of all things print related within Citrix environments, or any other type of environment, for that matter. Throughout this post I’d like to share with you how they simplify print management and let you, the IT Administrator, focus on Citrix – not printing!
Being a Nutanix (NTC) Technology Champion… What is it all about?
Being a Nutanix Technology Champion, NTC in short, is something special. Let me, throughout this post, try and provide you with some insights on what to expect once you’re ‘in’, so to speak. Although I can’t compare it to any of the other ‘programs’ out there, since this is the first time my efforts got recognized in such a way, I’m confident that they’re doing a more than decent job in keeping their community members up to speed with all that is going on within the company and everything that surrounds it.
12 services that make up the Citrix XenDesktop Flex Management Architecture!
The Flex Management Architecture is a service-orientated architecture, it consists out of ten, or twelve depending on your point of view, primary services in total. Let me explain, when administering a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for example, the Broker Service, a.k.a. the Desktop service, and the PortICA service both live on your desktop OS based VM’s, which are then part of the FMA as well, making it twelve services in total. Here I’ll provide you with a rundown of all services that make up the FMA including their responsibilities and some background information. I’ve included some artwork as well.
The (final) results are in! Project Virtual Reality Check 2015.
If, by skimming the title, you’re not sure what I am talking about here, which I doubt to be honest, than you need to check out this website first before continuing. Just a few hours ago I received the final results of this years Project VRC and I can tell that there are some interesting and useful facts in there. The beauty of it though, at least that’s how feel, is that it’s all a 100% authentic. With that I mean that all information recorded in the survey is provided by you, the all-round, real deal, no nonsense, hard core, customer focused, he (or she) who only sees solutions and eats problems for breakfast – IT professional! Does it get any better then this? No Really? But wait, let’s stay focussed here, I am allowed to publish two results, so without further ado…
Want to know what’s trending with VDI & SBC? Current and future insights!
You might have heard about something called Project VRC, or Project Virtual Reality Check, in full. The results of this independent and truly unique survey will provide us with many new insights into the usage of desktop virtualization and related technologies around the world. Last year over 1300 people participated, you can download the full 2013 / 2014 report here, and this year we (Ruben Spruijt en Jeroen van de Kamp) would like to repeat this survey to see how our industry has changed and to take a look at the future of VDI and SBC in 2015. To give you an idea on how they are doing, I’ve summarized the results up till now (also published on Twitter). Some interesting results so far, still over two weeks to go though.
Time to participate in the Project VRC “State of the VDI and SBC union 2015” survey
The independent R&D project ‘Virtual Reality Check’ (VRC) (www.projectvrc.com) was started in early 2009 by Ruben Spruijt (@rspruijt) and Jeroen van de Kamp (@thejeroen) and focuses on research in the desktop and application virtualization market. Several white papers with Login VSI (www.loginvsi.com) test results were published about the performance and best practices of different hypervisors, Microsoft Office versions, application virtualization solutions, Windows Operating Systems in server hosted desktop solutions and the impact of antivirus.