Nick Rintalan
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XenMobile Lessons Learned From the Field
I'm really excited about this article - I've been working with CloudGateway (our MAM solution) since its inception and I was elated when we closed the Zenprise acquisition right after the New Year, providing us with MDM capabilities. And I've had the great opportunity to be involved in some of our first large Consulting projects involving XenMobile MDM and the Mobile Solutions Bundle (MSB). And ...
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XenApp Farm and Zone Design (v2013)
This used to be a very popular topic back in the day, so I'm sure "old school" MetaFrame and CPS admins will appreciate this article. It also makes me happy to write about good 'ol XenApp, because it seems like I spend most of my time these days working with newer products like XenDesktop, Provisioning Services and XenMobile. And the reason I am writing this ...
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Session Reliability, Frozen Screens and The Hourglass of Death
Introduction I'll start by saying I should have probably published this article a long time ago. But I didn't because I usually only get this question about twice a year...and it was easy enough to dig up the last email from my archives and send it to the person who was asking about Session Reliability this time. But then just this past week, I got asked ...
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Should You Virtualize PVS? (Part 2)
In my inaugural blog post (which you should check out before reading this follow-up article), I asked this same question about 18 months ago. I've always been a big fan of virtualizing PVS and de-bunking the myth that PVS had to be physical, but unfortunately, the answer to that question a year and a half ago was "maybe" or "only in certain situations". In this ...
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Load Balancing TFTP with NetScaler
I published an article called "Load Balancing TFTP - Anything But Trivial" a little over a year ago. And since then, it's received over 10,000 hits and it's been one of the most popular articles I've ever written in terms of comments and offline emails that I receive about the article. If you haven't had a chance to read that article yet (or the comments), ...
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Sizing LUNs with VAAI – Another Citrix Perspective
Let's face it - we see a lot of VMware out there. And I might see a bit more than most people since I am part of our Consulting team and I primarily work in the large/enterprise space. In all honesty, I've probably done about the same amount of XenDesktop on vSphere deployments as XenDesktop on XenServer or Hyper-V deployments. So I've had to stay ...
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Beware the 50/50 Split with PvD
So you’ve got a use case for Citrix Personal vDisk (PvD) and you want to integrate it into your existing XenDesktop environment with your perfectly architected profile management solution – should be pretty straightforward, right? It certainly can be, but you really need to understand the key design considerations when implementing PvD. I’m going to talk about one of those key design considerations in this ...
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Is Isolating the PVS Streaming Traffic Really a Best Practice?
I get this question a lot. Maybe not as much as 'Should I Virtualize PVS?' or 'How many users/VMs can I get on a box?', but I get this question quite a bit. And I felt like it was time to address this since I see our customers, partners and even our own Consultants attempting to isolate the PVS streaming traffic onto its own network ...
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Clearing The Air – Fixed or Dynamic vDisks?
Have you ever heard conflicting information about a setting or best practice and wondered what was really true or the "real" best practice? Never from Citrix, right? ;) I've recently heard some people saying to use fixed vDisks with PVS and others saying dynamic. So what is the true or real best practice? That's precisely what I'd like to discuss in this article. Before I begin, please note: I'm ...
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The Pagefile Done Right!
After much internal debate and struggle, I've decided to finally write an article on the pagefile. Why the struggle? Because the topic is the Windows paging file...a pretty old concept that I think most folks understand, not to mention virtual memory is a pretty abstract and boring topic so I'm sure to lose a few people along the way. Then why am I finally writing ...