During the past week there has been a lot of excitement around the recent announcements regarding Azure RemoteApp being replaced by, what is now temporary called Citrix XenApp Express. Throughout this blog post I’d like to summarize what we know so far.
Citrix… What they’re missing or might need to work on. Just thinking out loud here.
During the last year or so I had couple of interesting discussions (trough CUGC, Twitter, real life etc.) on what Citrix might need to do from a business and application development perspective. Perhaps sell some of their products, reinvent, recode or reinvest in existing technology, innovate (which they’re doing) perhaps buy another company and so on and so forth. Of course it’s always easy to judge or come up with comments like these being a so-called sideline critic, but it’s not my intention to be the ‘wise guy’ here, I’m just thinking out loud, that is all.
How to: Upgrading and configuring StoreFront 3.0 – The Unified Experience!
During the last couple of weeks I have been testing several StoreFront / Receiver features. Relatively simple things like single sign-on for Receiver, working with multiple stores, hiding applications and/or desktops from StoreFront (Store) using PowerShell etc. things like that. At first I started out with the Tech Previews of the X1 Receiver and StoreFront 3.0, which worked ok, but I couldn’t do everything I wanted. When I reverted back to the (back then) latest Receiver build things were again fine and I could continue testing.
Desired State Configuration & the Citrix XenDesktop DSC Tech Preview
Desired State Configuration (DSC)… Ring any bells? No? It should by now. Although it isn’t a technology or concept thought up by Citrix, it is still very much applicable to Citrix components and infrastructures. DCS is a (still relatively) new management platform for Windows PowerShell allowing you to configure, apply and maintain a certain desired state (duh) on a single or multiple machine(s). A desired state can be anything related to software installation and configuration, the management of files and folders, registry entries, local group and account management, adding and removing server roles and the list goes on. Best thing is, as soon as something changes DSC will step in and correct it for you, preserving the desired state. DSC is a PowerShell extension and ships with Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1. Let’s have a closer look at what is needed.
What happens in Vegas… Goes on basvankaam.com Citrix Summit 2015 exposed!
I’m not in Las Vegas and I wasn’t able to catch the Summit Keynote live stream on the partner channel, honestly, I didn’t see a thing. All I could do was keep a close eye on my Twitter feed, which I did (so no NDA for me). Luckily it worked out pretty well. I’m sure I don’t have all the ins and outs and there are probably a few announcements that I’ve missed, those in Vegas will have some more detailed information I’m sure, but that doesn’t stop me from sharing what I did found out. It’s no secret that Citrix published most of the, if not all, major announcements on their website before, during and after the keynote session, although, it wasn’t all on there… read on.