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New in AOS 5.0: Nutanix Acropolis File Services

Average time to read: 4 minutes

It is hard to come up with a topic to write about when it comes to the Nutanix product portfolio. For one, there is just too much to choose from. I mean, just have a look at the list of features they introduced with the release of AOS 5.0 and it will get your head spinning. Secondly, their own documentation is just outstanding. Their product fact-sheets, website and of course Steven Poitras’s The Nutanix Bible, which contains just about everything you might want to about Nutanix and the bits and bytes involved. Never mind the endless list of community (Blog) rock stars working for or surrounding the company.

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Nutanix & Citrix… A match made in heaven. In 30 minutes we will tell you why!

Average time to read: 8 minutes

The title of our slide-deck, which we presented at the 7th Dutch Citrix User Group (DuCUG) over at Cisco Systems in Amsterdam (Friday the 25^th of September). ‘We’ in this case are Kees Baggerman, Sr. Solutions Architect over at Nutanix, and myself. We talked about Nutanix in general, why XenApp and/or XenDesktop both perform so well on Nutanix, the Acropolis infrastructure, the Distributed Storage and App Mobility Fabric, and of course, last but not least, the Acropolis Hypervisor, the latest addition to the Citrix Certified portfolio. We also touched on some of the services and features already available today (fully supported of course) and briefly highlighted some features which will be available in one of the upcoming Acropolis releases. I also included our slide-deck.

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

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.

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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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12 services that make up the Citrix XenDesktop Flex Management Architecture!

Average time to read: 6 minutes

The Flex Management Architecture is a service-orientated architecture, it consists out of ten, or twelve depending on your point of view, primary services in total. Let me explain, when administering a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for example, the Broker Service, a.k.a. the Desktop service, and the PortICA service both live on your desktop OS based VM’s, which are then part of the FMA as well, making it twelve services in total. Here I’ll provide you with a rundown of all services that make up the FMA including their responsibilities and some background information. I’ve included some artwork as well.

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

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.

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Block vs file level storage, VMware VMFS, NTFS and some of the protocols involved.

Average time to read: 14 minutes

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.

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