Author: Bas van Kaam

Father of three, EMEA Field CTO @ Nerdio, Author of the book Van de Basis tot aan Meester in de Cloud, Co-author of the book Project Byte-Sized and Yuthor of the book: Inside Citrix – The FlexCast Management Architecture, over 500 blog posts and multiple (ultimate) cheat sheets/e-books. Public speaker, sport enthusiast: above-average runner, 3 x burpee-mile finisher and a former semiprofessional snooker player. IT community participant and initiator of the AVD User group Community world wide.

Project Avalon… Excalibur! Part two

Average time to read: 18 minutes

It took me a few weeks but I finally got my test lab up and running. For the past three months I’ve been part of a study group in which we prepared for the new MCSE Desktop Infrastructure exams. During that period one of our MCT’s Jasper Kraak (www.kraak.com) organized two study sessions of three day’s each, one for each exam. Because we were using the official Microsoft curriculum one of the prerequisites was that we had to set up our own virtual test environment for lab practice. You guessed it…When we were finished I took it home with me.

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XenMobile product overview… and It’s nice!

Average time to read: 17 minutes

It was only about a month ago when I was writing my Blog about the CloudGateway that I wondered which route Citrix would take now that they acquired Zenprise, well… here it is… XenMobile, another Xen sibling sees the light! Lets jump right in… I had the opportunity to make use of one of Citrix’s demo environments to have a closer look at MDM, which is an awesome way to explore new and existing products by the way, if your company is a Citrix partner and has access I definitely recommend having a look. Besides that I used the Citrix E-Docs website as well as Citrix.com to find as much information as possible.

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Project Avalon… Excalibur! Part one

Average time to read: 9 minutes

Again, lots of new and exciting stuff going on with Citrix! Since I’m still in the researching phase and building up my demo environment I will try and split this Blog into two parts, part one being mostly textual giving you an idea on what it’s about, explain some new and improved technologies being used and getting you into an XenDesktop state of mind (you’ll understand in a minute, keep reading) before moving on to the actual installation and configuration phase being part two, which will be more of an product review. I must say, it looks impressive so far :-)

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Citrix Project Avalon

Average time to read: < 1 minute

I’m currently working on a new Blog in which I will discuss Citrix Project Avalon including the first two releases know as: Excalibur and Merlin. I’m still in the research phase to get my facts straight, give me a week or two, maybe three and I’ll report back.

The Citrix CloudGateway

Average time to read: 12 minutes

Cloud computing… A bunch of computing resources delivering some kind of service over the network, typically being the Internet. It includes, or should include, on demand self-service capabilities like: requesting access to certain applications and data, automated account provisioning or perhaps the ability to manage your own VM’s. It’s hot and everybody wants a piece! Services like Google Apps, Amazon cloud drive and Microsoft’s Azure, to name a few, are examples that do just that. These are the cloud solutions often referred to when the Cloud hype gets mentioned. But what about an on-premises solution, building your own private cloud which can be safely accessed from anywhere?!

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Troubleshooting one on one

Average time to read: 8 minutes

During the past few weeks I’ve collected a set of tools which assist in troubleshooting XenApp and XenDesktop orientated architectures. Before you continue make sure you have a look at the Citrix Brief Troubleshooting Guide: support.citrix.com/article/CTX106727 and the Citrix Logon Optimization Guide: support.citrix.com/article/CTX128277. Both are a MUST read with lots of tips and tricks, what and when to ask, and dozens of knowledge base articles including explanations on the logon processes etc…

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Citrix Printing Pathway… an overview

Average time to read: 5 minutes

Citrix printing can be, or at least can be made, pretty complex, unfortunately I had to find out the hard way myself. When troubleshooting print issues the path a print job follows throughout your infrastructure is always a good place to start especially when its performance related. However, you do need to understand the differences between the various routes a print job can take, why and where it could impact performance. I remember a few years back all this got me buzzing… Let’s start and see what comes up.

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