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SYN416: Best practices for managing personal virtual desktops
For the past few Synergy events, we've talked at breakout sessions about what Personal vDisk (PvD) is, and how it can fit into your XenDesktop deployments. During that time, we've seen PvD deployments grow from "tire kicking" to proof-of-concept deployments to production environments. Some customers now have PvDs deployed for thousands of users. We're continuing to see increased interest from customers in what PvD can ...
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Sizing Personal vDisks
Customers and prospective customers frequently ask "How large should my personal vDisk (PvD) disks be?" The default size is 10GB, but is that too large? Too small? Of course, the exact recommendation as to how large to size a PvD deployment is customer and deployment specific. However, since PvD is in use internally at Citrix (for some teams), we've built up a reasonable characterization as to ...
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Migrating from vDesk to Flexcast
With 2012 drawing to a close, I've seen an uptick in customer queries about migration options for their old RingCube vDesk deployments. For those of you not familiar with that product, it was a workspace virtualization solution that basically separated a Windows installation into two parts - the host part and the workspace part. The workspace functioned like a "light VM" in the sense that ...
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Personal vDisk v5.6.5
Last week we announced a new version of Citrix Personal vDisk (PVD), version 5.6.5. This version of PVD contains a number of enhancements and improvements based on feedback from customers and partners gathered over the past few quarters. We’ve focused our development efforts in this release around two key areas: Improving usability Improving performance We’ve improved usability by addressing some of the common concerns we’ve received from customers ...
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Understanding Personal vDisk (PVD) Log Files Part 2
In the previous installment, I outlined what you might find in the personal vDisk (PVD) filter driver log. That log contains entries generated during early machine boot, when PVD is locating its disk and getting the machine ready for persistent personalization. That log also (possibly) contains error messages and information when the PVD driver finds a resource it can't intercept, redirect, or process. When these ...
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Understanding Personal vDisk (PVD) Log Files Part 1
Personal vDisk (PVD) was shipped as part of XenDesktop 5.6 last March. In the months since then, we've presented PVD to both internal audiences as well as at Synergy last month in San Francisco. One of the topics that seems to come up frequently is troubleshooting and logging. PVD keeps two kinds of logs – one for the PVD filesystem driver and one for the user ...
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Down the Rabbit Hole – SYN119: Deep Dive on XenDesktop Personal vDisk
It's been a very short eight months since we (RingCube) joined Citrix, and since then, I've been amazed how quickly things have come together. When you switch from startup to a larger company, one expects the development cadence to slow somewhat, but it was not so this time. In the past eight months we've had not one but two releases of Personal vDisk (a tech ...