In the past I have written numerous times about Citrix Insight Services, or TaaS before that, which stands for Tools as a Service (don’t be confused, Insight Services was just another name change from TaaS). Smart Check builds upon these services and offers (at least) the same type of pro-active checks (equal to Insight Services) keeping your XenApp and/or XenDesktop Site healthy at all times. However, it is important to note that Smart Check is a completely new service on its own, part of the Smart Tools portfolio (formerly known as Citrix Lifecycle Management Services), which are a 100% Citrix cloud based, though they can be applied on-premises as well. This post is meant to provide you with all relevant information on Smart Check available today as well as any future developments going forward.
Citrix Support – A new model, a new hope, Citrix Customer Success Services
About two weeks ago Citrix announced part of their new support portfolio for 2017 and beyond, a.k.a. Citrix Customer Success Services. Starting January 1st 2017 customers will be able to purchase, or better said subscribe to (annually) a new support package named ‘Select’ (as part of the Customer Success Services umbrella) with two more packages following mid-2017 (June / July) referred to as ‘Priority’ and ‘Priority Plus’, although for now there is no detailed information available regarding these two additional packages. Let’s have a look at what we do know.
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.
The Citrix Long Term Service Release vs. the Current Release. What’s (really) new?
Not that long ago (during Summit 2016 to be exact) Citrix introduced two new XenApp / XenDesktop servicing options, the LTRS, which stands for Long Term Service Release and the CR a.k.a. Current Release. And while this is sort of a big deal, it does tend to confuse people on what to expect when it comes to Citrix support. This post is meant to clarify a couple of misconceptions that have been slowly formed during the last two months or so.