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.
About two weeks ago Citrix announced part of their new support portfolio for 2017 and beyond, a.k.a. Citrix Customer Success Services. Starting January 1st 2017 customers will be able to purchase, or better said subscribe to (annually) a new support package named ‘Select’ (as part of the Customer Success Services umbrella) with two more packages following mid-2017 (June / July) referred to as ‘Priority’ and ‘Priority Plus’, although for now there is no detailed information available regarding these two additional packages. Let’s have a look at what we do know.
During the past week there has been a lot of excitement around the recent announcements regarding Azure RemoteApp being replaced by, what is now temporary called Citrix XenApp Express. Throughout this blog post I’d like to summarize what we know so far.
We all know that Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop are both well established within larger enterprises. Smaller companies however, also often rely on Citrix (using XenApp mostly) to securely deliver their applications and/or desktops to their end-users. Today I would like to focus on how to deliver XenApp hosted applications and desktops while minimizing costs and maximizing both performance and manageability. Note that this is not going to be a Microsoft RDSH vs. Citrix debate, instead I will assume that XenApp licenses are already in-place.
It was always my intention to create an e-book version of my book as soon as I had it finished for print, and since I choose the Create Space self-publishing platform it had to be in the so-called Kindle format. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to offer it on Amazon, as I did with my paperback version as well. To be honest, of all the research I did, I didn’t spend any time looking at how to create a Kindle e-book. Something I would regret later on. I just assumed it would be fairly straightforward to convert a Word and/or .PDF document into a nicely formatted Kindle file. Boy was I wrong.
While there have been some major announcements at Synergy, like the Microsoft / Citrix pact including Azure, Office 356, Windows 10 VDI and more, some huge improvements to MCS regarding I/O storage optimizations, including MCS provisioning for the Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor, the Federated Authentication Service, which was also (very) well received, I’d like to focus on a few smaller enhancements. Though ‘small’ does not mean less important, au contraire – as the French would say.
Today I am extremely happy and proud to announce that my first ever book is now available for purchase over at Amazon. Continue reading to order your copy. Inside Citrix – The FlexCast Management Architecture focuses on the FMA, mainly from an architectural point of view. It will discuss, in detail all of its main components and services, their primary roles and responsibilities, including some of the most common optional components, features and/or closely related technologies. From the basics to deep (er) dives where applicable, I will make sure to include something for everybody. Do note that this book is not meant as an installation and/or how-to manual, instead it will dive deeper into the FMA, the true foundation of Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp.
A few moths ago, back in November 2015, Wilco van Bragt and I gave a presentation at E2EVC in Lisbon, Portugal. Our session was named: The XenDesktop 7.6 HA and Failover (im) possibilities, suggestions are welcome. We talked about some of the options we had (for example, Zones were not optional back then) in making our workloads highly available (Load Balancing included) using features and technologies like: StoreFront MultiSite configurations, Connection Leasing, Application groups and more. Next to that we also touched on some of the things still missing, at least according to our point of view. You can watch the full recording here.
Licensing can be complicated, not only do we need to consider XenApp and/or XenDesktop licenses; we also have to deal with Microsoft licensing, if we like or not. Throughout this chapter I will focus on the different types of Citrix licenses available, how they get applied from a XenApp / XenDesktop perspective and what other types of (Microsoft) licenses we need to take into consideration, like RDS, VDA (and no, this is not the Citrix VDA), CDL etc.
Not that long ago (during Summit 2016 to be exact) Citrix introduced two new XenApp / XenDesktop servicing options, the LTRS, which stands for Long Term Service Release and the CR a.k.a. Current Release. And while this is sort of a big deal, it does tend to confuse people on what to expect when it comes to Citrix support. This post is meant to clarify a couple of misconceptions that have been slowly formed during the last two months or so.
