I have just published another six chapters of my book Inside Citrix the FlexCast Management Architecture. You’ll find the links in this article. I’d also like to share my plan on publishing the other chapters and the book as a whole (in PDF format) within the next couple of months.
Continue reading Another SIX #InsideCitrix chapters published (big ones) and my plan going forward
Throughout the last couple of years, I have published multiple, so-called ultimate cheat sheets around the FMA, Citrix printing, and application layering. But also around IoT networking and IOPS in general, for example. Looking through my website statistics I can see that these articles or small e-books are by far the most popular, even the older ones. Because of this, and because I like to have them a bit more organized myself – they really come in handy from time to time – I decided to bundle them all into one page, for your convenience. The ultimate cheat sheet page, if you will. Next to this blogpost, you’ll also find it here (the page itself).
Version 7.14 introduces a new licensing option known as ‘multi-type licensing’ allowing you to consume different types of XenDesktop & XenApp license models within the same Site on a per Delivery Group basis. This post is meant to answer one or two questions you might have around this new feature.
Initially, with the introduction of StoreFront it relied solely on its authentication service for user authentication purposes. This, as you might be aware is different from Web Interface, which will directly contact one of the configured Delivery Controllers where the Broker/XML service will take over. Since Web Interface is still widely deployed and used in (large) production environments (and StoreFront now also supports XML based user authentication) I would like to talk, in a bit more detail about both authentication methods available today.
Continue reading Inside Citrix: Web Interface & StoreFront — XML-based user authentication
I like, no wait, I love lists… there, I’ve said it. But no, really, I think (bulleted) lists are one of the best ways to share facts and knowledge. That’s also why I used multiple lists in my book, dozens of them containing hundreds of bulleted (FMA) facts. Throughout the various chapters I highlight multiple so-called ‘FMA facts’, 116 in total to be exact and I conclude each chapter with a list of key takeaways. This post is meant to share with you most of the FMA Facts that I came up while writing The FlexCast Management Architecture, though I did slightly alter quite a few of them.
Continue reading For your convenience – 100+ Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop FMA facts listed!
A couple of days ago Citrix shared with us the pricing and purchasing options of their latest Citrix Cloud based service, XenDesktop Essentials. This post is meant to clear up a few misconceptions and to answer one or two questions you might have. Due to license restrictions, Microsoft didn’t allow Windows desktops to be offered from multi tenant cloud platforms. As a result of current changes to their Windows 10 PUR, or Product Use Right agreement this has now changed. Windows 10 desktop machines are soon to be available from the Azure cloud/Marketplace Read on to learn more…
Continue reading Citrix XenDesktop Essentials – all facts listed!
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.
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.
Continue reading VMwares’ Instant Clones technology with a touch of XenDesktop
This continues to be a topic of interest. Not only is it interesting and fun (right?) to know what is going on underneath the hood once you fill in your user credentials, it can also be very helpful when it comes to troubleshooting certain issues. While I have written about the login, enumeration and launch processes before, again I managed to include a couple of subtle changes/details.
The release of XenApp/XenDesktop version 7.12 introduced couple of new FMA services (primarily used by LHC) — time for an update. As you might be aware, I have written multiple articles on the FlexCast Management Architecture in the past (including my book) talking about its core services, their responsibilities, capabilities, communication channels/interfaces and so on. Throughout the past two years I also came up with a nice graphical overview (at least I like to think so) representing a Delivery Controller including all main FMA services. This article/post is meant to provide you with a continues update on the FMA and its primary core services, graphical overview included. Each time something changes you’ll read about it here – as soon as NDA has been lifted of course.
