Dan Allen
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XenDesktop – High Availability & Load Balancing Add On For Web Interface!
The XenDesktop Availability Problem Over the last several years I have been actively involved in helping many of our enterprise customers deploy large VDI environments. A reoccurring theme is that most, if not all, have experienced outages in their XenDesktop environments. This problem has not only been occurring with the large customers that I have personally been involved with, but I have also been getting emails ...
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Citrix Profile Management and VDI – Doing it Right Part 3!
I previously wrote two blog articles on properly configuring Citrix Profile Management and Folder Redirection and architecting it so that it scales for large environments. If you have not yet read the previous two articles, then I would suggest you read them first. You can find them at the links below: http://blogs.citrix.com/2012/02/11/citrix-profile-management-and-vdi-doing-it-right/ http://blogs.citrix.com/2012/08/05/citrix-profile-management-and-vdi-doing-it-right-part-2/ In this third and final installment of this series, I will provide some guidelines on ...
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Citrix Profile Management and VDI – Doing it Right Part 2!
I previously wrote a blog article on properly configuring Citrix Profile Management and Folder Redirection. If you have not yet read it, then I would suggest you read it first. All of the articles in this series apply to non-persistent virtual desktops or XenApp published desktops. You can find Part 1 at the link below: http://blogs.citrix.com/2012/02/11/citrix-profile-management-and-vdi-doing-it-right/ After I wrote the first article I received a lot of ...
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Citrix Profile Management and VDI – Doing it Right!
For anyone that has ever worked with XenApp or XenDesktop you know that user profiles can be one of the most difficult things to get right. This was one of the driving forces behind Citrix including a profile management solution as a standard component of all editions of XenDesktop. I am not going to go into the details of the various types of profile strategies nor ...
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Accelerate Google Earth with DirectX and the Google Earth Optimization Pack!
Do your users need to run Google Earth from a virtual desktop? If so, then you need to download and test the new Google Earth Optimization Pack for XenDesktop 5.5. The Google Earth Optimization Pack is available to all Enterprise and Platinum XenDesktop 5.5 users. The best part about this Optimization Pack is that it has no server and no client side GPU requirements! It ...
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Virtual Provisioning Server – A Successful Real World Example
A colleague of mine, Nick Rintalan, wrote an excellent blog post on whether one should virtualize Provisioning Server. If you have not read it, then I recommend you check it out here: http://blogs.citrix.com/2011/02/22/should-i-virtualize-provisioning-server/ I am an avid supporter of virtualizing Provisioning Server. Servers today are just too powerful and it is a waste of resources to run things on bare metal. Let’s face it, the average ...
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HDX Progressive Display – Don’t forget to turn it on!!!
At our Synergy event in San Francisco this past May 2011, Michael Schaeffer and I co-presented session SYN348 "Wow to How Part 4, Delivering a Delightful Desktop Experience". This session focused on some key things that should be done to ensure that a virtual Windows 7 desktop performs well for end users. If you missed Synergy and were unable to make the session, I recommend you ...
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Provisioning Services and CIFS Stores – Tuning For Performance
When deploying a Provisioning Services environment, the question of where to host the vDisk store and the VHD files for target devices often arises. There are really only two primary options: 1) Block Level Storage 2) NAS Storage (CIFS or in some cases NFS) I go into quite of a bit of detail as to why one should select block level storage and the benefits of Windows System ...
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SMB Tuning for XenApp and File Servers on Windows Server 2008
I have received a lot of questions from customers lately on whether there is a need to tune Windows Server 2008 file servers, especially if the client machines connecting to them are capable of using SMB 2.0, which includes Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2. Unfortunately, there is not much information out there on this topic, so I decided to ...