Microsoft – Page 4

Liquidwarelabs ProfileUnity & FlexApps overview. Version 6.5 soon to be released!

September 12, 2015 by Bas van Kaam Leave a Comment

Average time to read: 4 minutes

Last week Jason E Smith, who is the Global Director of User Management and Performance Solutions within Liquidwarelabs, showed and told me a thing or two about ProfileUnity, their User Environment Manager, including their application layering a.k.a. FlexApp solution. They are on the verge of releasing ProfileUnity / FlexApp version 6.5 (as of early October) which currently holds the status of Release Candidate 1, which is the one Jason showed me.

How to: Get up to speed with Windows Azure. Deploying your personal test lab, fast!

June 22, 2015 by Bas van Kaam Leave a Comment

Average time to read: 15 minutes

During the last couple of weekends I have been playing with Microsoft Azure. Once I was up to speed with the basics and concepts involved I was surprised how easy it was to set up a small test lab environment. Without using any automated setup and/or configuration scripts, it only took me a few hours to set up a fully functional test environment including Active Directory, DNS, a Certificate Authority, a XenApp/XenDesktop/Director Site, StoreFront/Receiver, Control-up and a few in place policies. Best of all, during the first 32 days it’s completely free of charge, at least for the first 150 euros. And I can tell you; those 150 can get you a long way if spend wisely. Make sure to check my 20+ takeaways and lessons learned near the end.

The glass is half full… 50+ reasons why I think it might be time to move to XenApp 7.6!

April 12, 2015 by Bas van Kaam 4 Comments

Average time to read: 7 minutes

In this post I’ll list a whole bunch of reasons why I think it might be time to move your current XenApp IMA setup onto the new and enhanced FMA, which, depending on your license, could be either XenApp and/or XenDesktop. I’m sure you’ll find some of my arguments a bit to far-fetched or perhaps plain stupid even, and that’s fine. Feel free to comment. As the title implies I’m trying to take a positive approach here, so I won’t focus on any of the features (still) left out. Eventually we will all migrate, it’s only a question of when. Note that the below comments are in a random order.

Citrix XenApp & Microsoft (online) Lync… Things to be aware of. My findings!

March 29, 2015 by Bas van Kaam 8 Comments

Average time to read: 9 minutes

Just recently I was in the process of researching to use Lync online (Office 365) in a XenApp HSD environment for one of our customers. To be honest I expected this to be a relatively straightforward process, install the software, configure, perhaps adjust my sizing numbers somewhat, test and take it from there. But what I found was that using Lync online combined with XenApp has its limitations. Of course some of these limitations can be dealt with, others however, we just have to except or take another route completely.

Want to know what’s trending with VDI & SBC? Current and future insights!

January 28, 2015 by Bas van Kaam Leave a Comment

Average time to read: 4 minutes

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.

Running Microsoft Security Essentials on Server 2012

January 20, 2015 by Bas van Kaam 2 Comments

Average time to read: 5 minutes

Just recently, while configuring my new virtual test setup at home (server 2012), one of the things I though about was what anti virus software to use. I’ve been using my Mac exclusively during the past 12 to 13 months or so, that’s right, it’s all I have, so I wasn’t really up to speed with some of the free AV solutions out there. Before I started using OS X I always used Microsoft Security Essentials, so I thought I’d give it a go on Server 2012 as well. Unfortunately it didn’t work nor is it supported in any way, till I found this useful hack (I know, it’s actually a workaround, hack just makes it sound way cooler). I also ran into an issue with my wireless network card.

XenDesktop SQL High Availability… What to use?!

December 16, 2013 by Bas van Kaam 13 Comments

Average time to read: 7 minutes

The XenDesktop Site Configuration Database is an important part of your infrastructure, when it’s is down, users won’t be able to connect and IT won’t be able to make any configuration changes. Because of this you’ll probably want to implement some kind of high availability mechanism keeping your database up and running at all times, or at least to try and keep downtime at a minimum. During one of my recent presentations in which I talked about XD7 including it’s database dependency, a discussion around which type of (SQL) HA mechanism we should implement quickly formed… What options do we have?

Microsoft’s Windows XP is hot! Read why.

November 25, 2013 by Bas van Kaam 2 Comments

Average time to read: 8 minutes

This article was originally written as a guest blogger for intense School IT educational services. This may sound a bit weird to some, but Microsoft’s Windows XP is hot! Perhaps not as hot as it was when it was first released, but it’s not far of. Unfortunately not in a good way. Next year, in April 2014 to be exact, Microsoft Windows XP will no longer be officially supported. During this article I’d like to explore the end of life concept, what we can do to prevent potential issues and have a look at some of the possible migration and or upgrade scenarios we have at our disposal. Is it time to dump those fat clients? Adopt VDI? DaaS or Hosted Shared Desktops perhaps? Let’s see what’s out there.

VIAB and Windows Server 2012 R2’s Data Deduplication

November 20, 2013 by Bas van Kaam Leave a Comment

Average time to read: 11 minutes

This article was originally written as a guest blogger for intense School IT educational services. Now I wouldn’t directly call this part three of my VDI series, although it’s probably not that far off. Rather think of it as the ‘hidden bonus track’ an extra addition if you will. During some of my previous articles I already talked about VDI, storage, IOPS and more. I also highlighted some of the newly introduced Windows Server 2012 R2 features offering us divers methods in building and managing our public and private cloud infrastructures including technologies like Domain join, Work Folders and a few more. For this article I’d like to combine two worlds and technologies; Citrix’s VDI-in-a-Box, yes, another way to do VDI, this might just be what you’ve been looking for all those years, and Microsoft’s Windows Server 2012 R2, focussing on (VDI) data deduplication in particular.

VDI, storage and the IOPS that come with it. Part 1 & 2.

November 12, 2013 by Bas van Kaam 2 Comments

Average time to read: 17 minutes

This article was originally written as a guest blogger for intense School IT educational services. One of the topics I’d like to discuss throughout this article is VDI and some of the common issues we (might) run into when it comes to storage, IOPS and image management. At the same time I’d also like to point out some possibilities, or better said, technologies, we have at our disposal in addressing these issues and talk a bit more on IOPS, block vs file level storage and image management. During part one I’ll primarily focus on VDI in general, describing its use and some of the common pitfalls we might encounter with part two primarily focusing on some real world solutions.

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