Citrix – Page 3 – basvankaam.com

Two factor (SMS) authentication — done right with SMSPassword!

Average time to read: 5 minutes

I have always been a fan of two factor authentication, or 2FA in short. Almost all companies and customers I have worked for and with used it in some shape or form. Especially SMS based 2FA — from an administrative perspective it is easy to set up, configure and maintain (if it isn’t you might want to consider switching vendors) and next to that it is also extremely user friendly and secure, when properly implemented that is. And of course, there is no need for any additional (expensive) third party tokens.

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HP Moonshot revisited. Well… by me anyway

Average time to read: 12 minutes

During the last year or so I have had my eye on the HP Moonshot platform. I followed what other community members had to say about it, how HP marketed the product and of course the announced partnership between HP and Citrix, introducing the Workspace Pod series at Summit not that long ago. I was rather skeptic, and I guess I still am. On the other hand, I also acknowledge that times are changing and that, if the use case fits, HP Moonshot might be a valuable solution, it just depends.

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Being a Nutanix (NTC) Technology Champion… What is it all about?

Average time to read: 5 minutes

Being a Nutanix Technology Champion, NTC in short, is something special. Let me, throughout this post, try and provide you with some insights on what to expect once you’re ‘in’, so to speak. Although I can’t compare it to any of the other ‘programs’ out there, since this is the first time my efforts got recognized in such a way, I’m confident that they’re doing a more than decent job in keeping their community members up to speed with all that is going on within the company and everything that surrounds it.

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Containers? Docker? Docker on VMware. Docker on Windows. Docker on Citrix?

Average time to read: 11 minutes

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.

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Sh*t just got real… The Nutanix Platform Expert Program!

Average time to read: 3 minutes

Last week Nutanix launched their flagship certification program, the Nutanix Platform Expert. Let me start by pointing out that the NPX program is not ‘just’ another IT certification and that it’s not to be taken lightly by any means. It is set out to become, and I quote, the most rigorous technical qualification in enterprise computing. NPX candidates are expected to have a considerable amount of IT industry (hands-on) experience and to be expert technologists, consultants, and solution architects with portfolios of work reflecting this expertise, with a strong focus on hyper-converged architectures. And no, I’m not trying to scare you. Curious? Learn more about the Nutanix Platform Expert (NPX) program they’ll gladly provide you with everything you want or need to know.

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The (final) results are in! Project Virtual Reality Check 2015.

Average time to read: 4 minutes

If, by skimming the title, you’re not sure what I am talking about here, which I doubt to be honest, than you need to check out this website first before continuing. Just a few hours ago I received the final results of this years Project VRC and I can tell that there are some interesting and useful facts in there. The beauty of it though, at least that’s how feel, is that it’s all a 100% authentic. With that I mean that all information recorded in the survey is provided by you, the all-round, real deal, no nonsense, hard core, customer focused, he (or she) who only sees solutions and eats problems for breakfast – IT professional! Does it get any better then this? No Really? But wait, let’s stay focussed here, I am allowed to publish two results, so without further ado…

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What happens in Vegas… Goes on basvankaam.com Citrix Summit 2015 exposed!

Average time to read: 9 minutes

I’m not in Las Vegas and I wasn’t able to catch the Summit Keynote live stream on the partner channel, honestly, I didn’t see a thing. All I could do was keep a close eye on my Twitter feed, which I did (so no NDA for me). Luckily it worked out pretty well. I’m sure I don’t have all the ins and outs and there are probably a few announcements that I’ve missed, those in Vegas will have some more detailed information I’m sure, but that doesn’t stop me from sharing what I did found out. It’s no secret that Citrix published most of the, if not all, major announcements on their website before, during and after the keynote session, although, it wasn’t all on there… read on.

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Time to participate in the Project VRC “State of the VDI and SBC union 2015” survey

Average time to read: 2 minutes

The independent R&D project ‘Virtual Reality Check’ (VRC) (www.projectvrc.com) was started in early 2009 by Ruben Spruijt (@rspruijt) and Jeroen van de Kamp (@thejeroen) and focuses on research in the desktop and application virtualization market. Several white papers with Login VSI (www.loginvsi.com) test results were published about the performance and best practices of different hypervisors, Microsoft Office versions, application virtualization solutions, Windows Operating Systems in server hosted desktop solutions and the impact of antivirus.

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XenDesktop 7.x internals continued… The Server VDA in more detail.

Average time to read: 3 minutes

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).

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The ultimate Citrix XenDesktop 7.x internals cheat sheet!

Average time to read: 31 minutes

Ever wondered what happens after a user fills in his or her username and password? What the difference is between internal and external user authentication, resource enumeration and the accompanying launch process? Or what about Web-Interface and StoreFront, do they both have the same authentication mechanism? What are the differences between the server and desktop VDA’s? What about the VDA and XenDesktop internals, what happens inside a VDA when a resource is launched? How does a connection get brokered? Read about this and more during the next 8 (mini) chapters.