About two and a half years ago I published the ultimate Citrix XenDesktop 7.x internals cheat sheet, version 1.0 and it turned out to be a big hit. In the meantime, it has been viewed over 80.000 times already. All the more reason to start working on version 2.0. Since I have been writing about Citrix technologies for the last couple of years I have built up a broad archive, which I can now partly (re) use and re-write to come up with an even more detailed edition, version 2.0 of the Citrix XenDesktop 7.x internals cheat sheet. I would strongly advice you to download a .PDF copy – If you like the blogpost, you’ll love the .PDF, trust me! It includes a full Table of Contents making it easier to navigate.
Demystifying the Citrix XenApp logon, enumeration and launch steps — new details included
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.
E2EVC… The one in Lisbon. The XD 7.6 HA (im) possibilities – presentation video!
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.
Citrix IMA vs. FMA… XenDesktop components and terminology cheat sheet
This post is meant to provide you with a quick comparison, a cheat sheet if you will, between the two architectures. As you all (should) know by now, with the introduction of XenDesktop 7.x XenApp became part of the Flexcast Management Architecture, or FMA in short, and with this came certain terminology and conceptual changes. Here I would like to show you how each former 6.5 (IMA) XenApp component has its equivalent in the FMA world. Although technically there are some differences, on the functional side of things there is not much between them. To be clear, I’m not focusing on features that are in IMA and (still) not in FMA.
The glass is half full… 50+ reasons why I think it might be time to move to XenApp 7.6!
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.