Are you, or is your company thinking about offering IoT services to its/your customers? If so, you (or they) have probably noticed that there is a lot to think about and that it goes way beyond the technology and/or tools involved. For most organisations, it requires a different mindset and a curtain degree of resourcefulness as well as creativity — not to be underestimated.
Continue reading Defining your IoT strategy – first things first!
Throughout the years there have been countless discussions about the potential added value of the Citrix XenApp and/or XenDesktop Platinum license, and rightfully so since you roughly pay about 1/3 more when compared to an Enterprise license, at least as far as XenApp goes.
Continue reading Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop Platinum edition — a true Gem. You agree?
Now that my book is out in the open I get a lot of questions about my approach. People are really interested to find out how long it took me to complete, what kind of tools I used, where I found the time, what drove me to write a book in the first place and of course what I’ve learned along the way. And since I like to share… hopefully this post will answer most, if not all of these and other questions you guys might have.
Continue reading Inside Citrix – The making of & lessons learned!
A user clicks print, what happens next? When Citrix is thrown in the mix things work a bit differently. Although the Microsoft print basics still apply, and I’ll discuss them shortly, the way that print traffic will, or can be, routed throughout your environment depends on, one: the physical setup of your machines and printers and, two: the Citrix (print) policies configured. Due note that I will only focus on native Citrix printing and won’t go over any of the third party solutions out there.
Continue reading Citrix printing internals cheat sheet… Part one!
With all the excitement going on around Docker, and containerisation in general, including the latest rumours around Microsoft’s Nano Server, I thought it might be useful to have a closer look at this technology to see what it can and cannot do and when it might be a good time to actually start using it in a real world scenario.
Continue reading Containers? Docker? Docker on VMware. Docker on Windows. Docker on Citrix?
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.
Continue reading Desired State Configuration & the Citrix XenDesktop DSC Tech Preview
Although the new FMA based Server VDA has been built from the ground up it still has a lot of similarities when compared to the ‘old’ ICA protocol stack deployed with XenApp 6.5 and earlier versions. However, unlike XenApp, the VDA (Virtual Delivery Agent) directly communicates with the Delivery Controller, it does this through the Broker Agent, basically the same way as we are used to with the desktop VDA (PortICA).
Continue reading XenDesktop 7.x internals continued… The Server VDA in more detail.
During the past few months I have spend a considerable amount of time looking at various storage related topics. Among others I discussed Web Scale technology as part of converged and software defined architectures, with Nutanix being one of the main vendors, next I also took a, somewhat, deeper dive into the wondrous world of IOPS where I talked about some of their characteristics and ways to potentially enhance performance and the end user experience, which are still two of the main concerns when dealing with these bad boys. Throughout this article I want to take a closer look at some of the differences between block vs file level storage, the accompanying file systems, the different protocols used, potential block sizes and some of the characteristics of VMware VMFS in particular.
Continue reading Block vs file level storage, VMware VMFS, NTFS and some of the protocols involved.
Sounds easy enough right? Rebooting your XenDesktop Site’s application servers. When your Site isn’t that big and you don’t have a few hundred machines running or you have to deal with 24/7 shifts and so on, it can be fairly straightforward. I don’t want to spend to much time on why we would want, or need, to reboot our machines on a weekly or perhaps daily basis etc. a lot of factors come into play and there’s really no ‘one size fits all’. You could be using App-V or Citrix provisioning Services for example, both caching data which you would like to clear from time to time. Or perhaps the underlying Windows OS, when physically installed, might need a refresh every once in awhile, which we all know it does! Fact of the matter is, reboots are a given and need to be thought trough to keep operations running as smooth as possible. Make sure to finish the article, there is a question on the Citrix build-in reboot tooling, maybe you can help me out!
Continue reading How to: Rebooting your XenDesktop 7.x application servers.
With the merge of XenApp into XenDesktop’s Flex Management Architecture (FMA) a lot changed, for most XenApp admins it meant they had to rethink their designs and as a result it was back to the drawing board. Take application, or resource, publishing for example, we now have to deal Delivery Groups and Machine Catalogs, nothing new if you’re used to working with XenDesktop, but if it’s ‘just’ XenApp you know, well… Even now where XenApp 7.5 is a product on it’s own, again, it’s still based on the Flex Management Architecture meaning it also still uses the same wizards and configuration options as in XenDesktop 7.x a few months ago, for the most part anyway.
Continue reading Configuring Citrix XenDesktop 7.x Desktop publishing and Limited Visibility!
