January 2017 – basvankaam.com

Citrix Smart Check — the latest addition to the Smart Tools portfolio. Make sure to take it for a test-ride

Average time to read: 5 minutes

A few months ago Citrix renamed their Lifecycle Management Services to Smart Tools. Take a look at this post from fellow CTP Andrew Wood, it explains in-detail what Citrix Lifecycle Management Services is all about, including the name change. Smart Tools consists out of four distinct services each fulfilling their own purpose, for this post I would like to focus on the Smart Check service.

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VMwares’ Instant Clones technology with a touch of XenDesktop

Average time to read: 6 minutes

Also know as Just In Time (JIT) desktops, or vmFork technology. In short, it enables you to clone an existing virtual machine in just a matter of seconds — close to one clone per second actually. Its technology is based on in-memory cloning of a Master virtual machine (which also means it shares the memory of the so-called parent virtual machine) and copy-on-write for rapid deploy purposes. As you can probably imagine, this approach offers some unique desktop provisioning options when combined with, let’s say a Citrix XenDesktop Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, or VDI in short. Do note however that initially Instant Clones are/were a feature of VMware Horizon version 7 (Enterprise edition) and upwards, it was VMware’s Project Orion that introduced Instant Clones to Citrix’s XenDesktop, which is still in tech preview.

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Non-NDA. What’s new from Citrix Summit 2017

Average time to read: 5 minutes

This post will cover what’s new from Citrix — announcements made from their annual Citrix Summit conference, held in Anaheim this year. As to be expected, this will be a work in progress for the coming days. All information shared will be non-NDA, meaning it will also be shared on other blogs/websites, like Citrix’s’, for example. Single pane access, that’s the main thought, for your convenience. Here goes. Continue reading Non-NDA. What’s new from Citrix Summit 2017

Citrix acquires Unidesk — here’s everything you want/need to know!

Average time to read: 4 minutes

Today Citrix announced that they have acquired Unidesk — the leading application packaging (layering) and lifecycle management solution for the digital workspace. If you are not familiar with Unidesk, or application layering technology in general for that matter, I would strongly advice you to go and have a look at their website. They offer a couple of unique features taking application packaging and delivery to a whole new level. As they like to say ‘Layering changes everything‘. Let’s have a look at what this all means for both Citrix and Unidesk.

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New in AOS 5.0: Nutanix Acropolis File Services

Average time to read: 4 minutes

It is hard to come up with a topic to write about when it comes to the Nutanix product portfolio. For one, there is just too much to choose from. I mean, just have a look at the list of features they introduced with the release of AOS 5.0 and it will get your head spinning. Secondly, their own documentation is just outstanding. Their product fact-sheets, website and of course Steven Poitras’s The Nutanix Bible, which contains just about everything you might want to about Nutanix and the bits and bytes involved. Never mind the endless list of community (Blog) rock stars working for or surrounding the company.

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2016 — A personal look in the rearview mirror

Average time to read: 6 minutes

And what a year it has been! Personally as well as professionally I have managed to improve and surprise myself on multiple levels. On some occasions I wasn’t even capable of spelling ‘comfort-zone’ correctly, I was so far off. The best thing is, I already have some great prospects for 2017 as well, but I’ll (have to) save that for a future post, not to long from now. 2016, like 2015 before that was again packed with community get-togethers’, mostly in the form of conferences, some small (er) some big/huge, but all fun and it truly never gets tiring, presenting included. Ok, let’s reflect for a minute, shall we…

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