This article was originally written as a guest blogger for intense School IT educational services. Let’s continue where we left off. Windows server 2012 R2 has been available as a tech preview download as of June 2013 and was officially released on October 18, 2013, together with Windows 8.1. It’s now more enterprise-class, application-focused and cloud-oriented than ever. High-performance multi-tenant storage, software-defined networking, and multiple VDI and RDP enhancements are some of the new and improved technologies that have been included in the R2 release.
XenDesktop on Azure continued…
Last week I had a great talk with Mr. Kurt Moody from Citrix. We discussed my Blog post: Why you shouldn’t deploy XD7 on Azure just yet, together with some of my remarks regarding the Citrix XenDesktop 7 on Windows Azure Design Guide which I used as a reference throughout and, in the end, lead to my conclusion of Azure not being as XD7 ready as we hoped it would be, at least not for now. I know, last week I was a bit more ‘outspoken’.
Why you shouldn’t deploy XD7 on Azure just yet.
Both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) are nothing new and have been around for a few years now. Just short of two months ago Citrix, along with Microsoft, announced the availability of XenDesktop 7 on Windows Azure. Finally, full Remote Desktop Services (RDS) availability in the Cloud, or so it seemed. Although I was instantly interested, my (spare) time was scares during that period so I had to postpone my ‘Cloud’ ambitions. About a week ago I came across a random article discussing RDS on Windows Azure, an interesting read. After that I decided to do some research and perhaps open up a temp Azure account so I could experience its look and feel for myself.