I’ve always had a big interest in printing. It’s something I have written about and presented on extensively in the past. Throughout the years I have had my fair share of failure when it comes to printing in Citrix/RDSH/VDI based environments (who hasn’t?) so I decided to dig in a bit deeper. Not too long ago I got introduced to Tricerat, a very simple, yet effective and efficient solution when it comes to taking care of all things print related within Citrix environments, or any other type of environment, for that matter. Throughout this post I’d like to share with you how they simplify print management and let you, the IT Administrator, focus on Citrix – not printing!
A new chapter! Excited to announce that I will be joining Liquidware
After three great years with Detron I acepted a new role/challenge over at Liquidware. Building on their current EMEA presence in both the UK and Switzerland, I will be joining Liquidware in the Netherlands from where we will focus on further business expansion within NL, the Benelux and other European regions – read on.
A few ‘State of the VDI and SBC union’ results in more detail
Last month Login VSI presented the results of their State of the VDI and SBC union world-wide survey. Together with the help of Ruben Spruijt (CTO Atlantis computing) and ControlUp they published a thorough 59-page document holding all kinds of interesting VDI and SBC related statistics. The survey was completed by 580 people in total. I went through the report and picked out a couple of subjects which are currently of most interest for me personally, for multiple reasons.
Non-NDA. What’s new from Citrix Summit 2017
This post will cover what’s new from Citrix — announcements made from their annual Citrix Summit conference, held in Anaheim this year. As to be expected, this will be a work in progress for the coming days. All information shared will be non-NDA, meaning it will also be shared on other blogs/websites, like Citrix’s’, for example. Single pane access, that’s the main thought, for your convenience. Here goes.Continue Reading
The results are in — The state of public cloud services, survey. Downloadable .PDF report included
A couple of weeks ago I launched the first ever ‘The state of public cloud services – the 2016 community edition’ online survey. It included a short textual introduction followed by 35 questions in total and a few fun ‘quotes’ in between. While it turned out to be a bit more work then I anticipated beforehand, I am very satisfied with the final outcome. Below you will find the final report in a .PDF format, free for everyone to download.
Two factor (SMS) authentication — done right with SMSPassword!
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.
Citrix licensing (and Microsoft) demystified? I need your help!
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.
Application Layering questions? I got answers. Graphical cheat sheet included!
Application virtualization (mostly App-V & Thinapp) has been around for some time now, application layering however, is still relatively new. Although assumed by some and theoretically possible in some cases, application layering is not meant as a replacement for application virtualization. In fact, you could say that they go hand in hand. Today there are multiple layering solutions available, and while the concept is the same they all take a (slightly) different approach. By the way, if it’s the (graphical) cheat sheet you’re interested in, I would suggest you scroll down.
Continue ReadingHoudini’s guide to Citrix printing… My contribution to the first ever Virtual Expo!
Average time to read: < 1 minuteThis was/is the title of my presentation, which I presented at the first ever Virtual Expo powered by Xenappblog.com on September 30th 2015. And what a ride it turned out to be. A great event with some top-notch speakers, awesome content and for me personally it was my first ever webinar. Have a look at the recording below. I really enjoyed some of the research involved, making the slides and of course presenting all this during the Virtual Expo conference, a great initiative. Let me know what you think. Note that I’m also working on a detailed blog post to go with it, give me a few weeks. And yes, I know, I’ll make sure to keep an eye on my mouse pointer the next time :)
Nutanix & Citrix… A match made in heaven. In 30 minutes we will tell you why!
Average time to read: 8 minutesThe title of our slide-deck, which we presented at the 7th Dutch Citrix User Group (DuCUG) over at Cisco Systems in Amsterdam (Friday the 25th 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.