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Safe Practice for Memory Overcommit
I've had another discussion with people passionate about memory overcommitting for virtual desktops. My stance is it can be dangerous if you take it too far. Unfortunately, many reports I see talking about the value of memory overcommit take it too far. So where is just far enough? Let's go through an example (I've generalized this as I don't want to talk about each different ...
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The desktop is just another application
Had a brief discussion on twitter the other day where people (@simoncrosby, @joeshonk, @RichCrusco) were saying that we only need to focus on delivering applications and NOT a Windows 7 desktop. I completely disagree. In fact, we should be treating the desktop interface as an application. Of course the desktop-haters immediately came out saying "No, the desktop is not an application." This was ...
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When you need more than a shared desktop
When working on desktop transformation designs, many start with the VDI (personal) model. I tend to go for the RDS (Shared) model. There are many reasons why, but mainly it is because Scalability: Most agree that a shared desktop environment achieves better scalability than personal desktop environments. Storage: Due to the shared operating system, the impact on storage is mostly a non-issue Security: Although a desktop ...
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XenApp Published Apps In Fashion Again
When starting to transform a desktop, many people get stuck at one of the first decisions: What type of virtual desktop should I implement? (VDI, RDS, Local VM, etc) There are so many options for so many use cases that we are stuck analyzing our users until we confuse ourselves even more. The problem is we are trying to start by dealing with ...
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Expanding Your XenApp Environments for Virtual Desktops
I've heard many people talk about how to start their desktop transformation projects when they are looking at 5000 desktops. How do you even begin? The number of desktops, users and applications is so overwhelming many can't even figure out how to begin. The desktop environment is so vast that making any change looks impossible. But it isn't impossible if you start correctly. You have to ...
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Time to Ask the Architects in Barcelona
If you could ask a Citrix consulting architect a question, what would it be? Would you ask a specific design question about your environment? Or would you focus on better understanding a XenDesktop concept? Or would you ask them who their favorite Star Trek captain is (Benjamin Sisko)? What if you could ask 8 architects? Well, Synergy Barcelona is your chance. Not going to Barcelona? ...
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XenDesktop, XenApp or VDI in a Box… How we decided
I've been absent from the blogging world for some time due to summer holiday and working on two different projects with two new technologies (Kaviza and CloudStack). In the future, I'm might be able to talk about CloudStack items, but today the focus is on Kaviza. The project I've been involved with is focused on delivering desktops for 200 concurrent users. We had three options: XenDesktop ...
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Machine Creation Services Primer – Part 2
In the first part of the Machine Creation Services Primer, we focused on the creation of Pooled-Random, Pooled-Static and Dedicated desktops. The process was very similar. However, at this point, items start to change and I want to focus on updating the master image, as this question usually comes up pretty quickly. With Machine Creation Services, we have a master virtual machine somewhere within our environment. ...
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Virus Alert!!!
I also just got back from BriForum 2011 – Chicago and attended two sessions that furthered my beliefs that blanketing antivirus across all of my virtual desktops probably isn't the best thing. First, Jim Moyle focused his session on a deep dive into Windows IOPS and showed how different actions impact IOPS requirements in a virtual desktop. Let's just say the graph for certain Antivirus ...
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Machine Creation Services Primer – Part 1
I get a lot of questions about different components of XenDesktop. What are they? How do they work? Should I use it? I've decided to spend some cycles trying to provide information about some of these components. The first one we will hit is Machine Creation Services. Machine Creation Services (MCS) is one option for desktop image delivery. It simply uses the hypervisor APIs (XenServer, Hyper-V, ...