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Calling all DC & MD (NON-FEDERAL) Organizations!!!
RIGHT NOW Citrix is hosting our Annual #CitrixSynergy event in Las Vegas where there's a LOT of very exciting news, demonstrations, and thought provoking strategies being presented to our audience!
Just because you weren't able to attend Synergy doesn't mean you should be starved of knowledge!!!
Our Team is ready to come onsite to deliver the messaging to you in a 1:1 format. Think of it as your own personal Synergy!
If you are based in DC or MD and are NOT a Federal customer please contact us so we can set up a 60-90min meeting. We can use a whiteboard, a projector, a combo of the two or no medium other than conversation to convey our messaging.
Please reach out to my Inside Sales Representative Jose Parada to coordinate a date & time!
jose.parada@citrix.com or 954.229.6849
Thank You!
JessICADemers
Field Sales Manager | DC & MD
CiTR!X Systems, Inc
_________________________
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Upcoming Citrix seminars & webinars in North America
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Part I of the Deep Dive into XenDesktop series reviewed the architecture. Part II covered the install and management tools. Part III reviewed an example XenDesktop Pilot Architecture. Part IV reviewed the Virtual Desktop Delivery of Dan Feller's "XenDesktop Pilot Implementation Guide". Part V reviewed the integration with XenApp for application delivery to the virtual desktops. Part VI covers User Personalization with Citrix User Profile Manager. This is the third section from Dan's Pilot Implementation Guide.
This embedded presentation covers the "Personalization" section of the Pilot Implementation Guide.
Click here to view the presentation in full screen at Slide Share.
This presentation does have several slide notes that provide additional detail. You can view the slide notes here.
Frank Anderson on the XenDesktop team has created a few screencasts covering the features of XenDesktop. You can watch his short screencast covering the provisioning and lifecycle management features of XenDesktop here
. Frank's screencast on user experience is available here.
Download the free XenDesktop Express Edition here
Part I of the Deep Dive into XenDesktop series reviewed the architecture. Part II covered the install and management tools. Part III reviewed an example XenDesktop Pilot Architecture. Part IV reviewed the Virtual Desktop Delivery of Dan Feller's "XenDesktop Pilot Implementation Guide". Now in Part V we review the integration with XenApp for application delivery to the virtual desktops. This is the second section from Dan's Pilot Implementation Guide.
This embedded presentation covers the "Application Delivery" section of the Pilot Implementation Guide.
Click here to view the presentation in full screen at Slide Share.
This presentation does have several slide notes that provide additional detail. You can view the slide notes here.
Frank Anderson on the XenDesktop team has created a few screencasts covering the features of XenDesktop. You can watch his short screencast covering the provisioning and lifecycle management features of XenDesktop here. Frank's screencast on user experience is available here.
Download the free XenDesktop Express Edition here
Part I of the Deep Dive into XenDesktop series reviewed the architecture. Part II covered the install and management tools. Part III reviewed an example XenDesktop Pilot Architecture. Part IV reviews the first section of Dan Feller's "XenDesktop Pilot Implementation Guide". Dan goes through each step of configuring a pilot from start to finish.
This first embedded presentation covers the "Virtual Desktop Delivery" section of the Pilot Implementation Guide.
Click here to view the presentation in full screen at Slide Share.
This presentation does have several slide notes that provide additional detail. You can view the slide notes here.
Frank Anderson on the XenDesktop team has created a few screencasts covering the features of XenDesktop. You can watch his short screencast covering the provisioning and lifecycle management features of XenDesktop here. Frank's screencast on user experience is available here.
Download the free XenDesktop Express Edition here
Part I of the Deep Dive into XenDesktop series reviewed the architecture. Part II covered the install and management tools. Part III reviews an example XenDesktop Pilot Architecture. This presentation is based on the "XenDesktop Pilot Reference Architecture" document by Dan Feller. Here is the the introduction to Dan's white paper -
Overview
Properly delivering desktops to users is a core requirement for just about any business. If users are unable to use their desktops or applications, the business cannot function at full utilization. Every few years, just about every business undergoes a massive rollout of a new operating system, new hardware or new applications requiring a swarm of individuals to build, test and rollout the newest systems to the masses. Because of this enormous undertaking, many organizations hold off on beneficial upgrades, which oftentimes limit how fast the organization can turn to changing market demands.
There are automated tools from numerous vendors to help in the deployment of new applications and operating systems, but the question should be raised if deploying applications out to the user population is still the best approach. This type of approach incurs numerous consequences impacting the user and the business like:
- Loss of end-user device opens up significant security concerns for lost data
- Corruption of the operating system or application by malicious or inadvertent acts requires extensive troubleshooting and administrative time resulting in end-user downtime
- System upgrades are delayed due to the costs associated with the procurement of new hardware.
Instead of going down the old approach of deploying operating systems and applications to thousands of physical workstations, a dynamically provisioned virtual desktop environment will offer organizations the ability to provide their users that latest environments without the time and costs associated with a large-scale desktop rollout. Before the rollout begins, it is recommended a pilot program is launched that validates the recommended design based on business and user requirements.
This document provides a reference architecture for a XenDesktop Pilot. It is broken up into the following components:
- Virtual Desktop Requirements
- Solution Overview
- Technical Architecture
Dan put together a list of requirements for this Pilot Reference Architecture -
The pilot is the last stage of testing and validating the design and environment build before moving towards a full-scale production rollout. A small set of users will work with the production-level environment and validate the solution is functional and meets the overall virtual desktop requirements. For the architecture defined throughout this document, the following requirements are used:
- Users should be able to personalize their virtual desktop environment with application configurations, environment settings and user preferences. The personalization settings should follow the user from system-to-system.
- Users should be able to continue working within their virtual desktop even if there is a failure of a component within the environment.
- Users should be able to get access to their virtual desktop securely and over remote connections without relying on a VPN client
- A single base standard image should be used for all users within the pilot group.
- Updating the operating system with the latest security patches should only be required on a single image. Those changes should be propagated to all users' virtual desktops.
- Users should only see the applications they have been assigned as seeing all applications causes confusion.
I have broken the great content of the pdf into smaller, bite size chunks to make it more digestible within a slide format (especially the step by step tables). Before each step in the tables, I added in the reference diagram with a big arrow that points to the step within the diagram. There are a lot of slides, but the amount of content on each slide is much easier to swallow in this format IMO.
Click here to view the presentation in full screen at Slide Share.
This presentation does have several slide notes that provide additional detail. You can view the slide notes here.
Frank Anderson on the XenDesktop team has created a few screencasts covering the features of XenDesktop. You can watch his short screencast covering the provisioning and lifecycle management features of XenDesktop here. Frank's screencast on user experience is available here.
Download the free XenDesktop Express Edition here
Thanks to Dan Feller for putting together an excellent whitepaper and allowing me to convert that content into this format. I hope you find this useful.
In the first Deep Dive into XenDesktop post, the embedded presentation covered the architecture of XenDesktop. This next presentation reviews the install of the the Desktop Delivery Controller and the Virtual Desktop Agent, then reviews the Management Console, Desktop Groups, and the Citrix Desktop Toolbar.
Click here to view the presentation in full screen at Slide Share.
This presentation does have several slide notes that provide additional detail. You can view the slide notes here.
Frank Anderson on the XenDesktop team has created a few screencasts covering the features of XenDesktop. You can watch his short screencast covering the provisioning and lifecycle management features of XenDesktop here. Frank's screencast on user experience is available here
Download the free XenDesktop Express Edition here
Thanks to Richard Nash on the SE team for providing much of the source material for this slide presentation.
The new XenApp template for XenServer has generated a great deal of interest. There have been a several posts about XenApp on XenServer on the Citrix Blog (read Dan Feller's posts here, here, here and here). You can listen to an interview with Dan about this topic as part of the Citrix Delivery Center podcast here.
Recently Laura Whalen in our Solutions Marketing team put together an excellent slide presentation that covers the reasons why you would want to virtualize XenApp on XenServer.
One of the first few slides of the presentation reviews the business case for virtualization based on data from IDC and Gartner. It occurred to me as I reviewed this slide that this might be a good opportunity to add in some slides I recently put together for a different purpose.
A couple of months ago I was asked to give a presentation to some non-technical business leaders in my area about virtualization. As I thought about how to explain to these CEO's and CFO's why virtualization gets so much buzz, it seemed obvious to focus on the costs savings. In my opinion, the server consolidation and costs savings created by server virtualization are a primary driver in most companies first foray into server virtualization. Rapid deployment, high availability and disaster recovery obviously play a huge role in expanding the reach of virtualization, but in my experience the costs savings of consolidation are the biggest initial factor. The ridiculously high costs of energy these days make this costs savings even more important.
After making that decision, I decided to take some data I saw in a webinar by John Humphries of IDC and Simon Crosby of Citrix (archive here) to use as the basis for the presentation to these business leaders.
Of course, a slide presentation full of numbers is no more effective than a presentation filled with technology jargon. I decided to use as many visuals as I possibly could so I did not put the audience to sleep in the first two minutes. I added in numerous stock photos (mostly from istockphoto.com), some public domain pictures from USA.gov and a few photos and screen shots of my own to make a very visual presentation. I have taken a few slides from that deck and added them into the deck built by Laura Whalen.
The template for the other slide deck included a black background. I was not able to get the graphics to work properly in the standard Citrix template (with a white background) without many hours of pixel by pixel editing. I was able to use the transparent re-color feature of PowerPoint 2007 to convert the graphics from Laura's presentation to work with a black background, however.
My Frankenstein presentation creation is embedded below.
(click here to see the presentation in full screen)
Scalability of XenApp on other virtualization products has prevented many from using server virtualization with XenApp. One of the highest priorities after the acquisition of XenSource was to improve this scalability. The new XenApp template does this. You can virtualize the management components of your XenApp farm and individual XenApp servers to gain the availability, management and disaster recovery benefits. We have found that for many resource intensive applications a one vm to physical server provides the best scalability. You can still gain the availability, management and recovery benefits for those servers.
Since there are many notes included with this presentation (mostly from Laura) I have uploaded a pdf of the notes pages (in a zip file to shrink the size a bit).
EDIT: The posts and podcast interview I did with Dan Feller provide much more in depth coverage of this topic. To avoid any confusion, the x64 version of XenApp is recommended for use with XenApp on XenServer. The server utilization number referred to in the slide deck is from an IDC estimate of all servers, not just XenApp servers. As I mentioned in the post and you can see from the documentation provided by Dan, most XenApp servers running applications for users will be the most scalable when one vm is running on one physical server. The cost savings from reduction in servers comes into play with those servers because XenApp running on XenServer is much more scalable than any other virtualization platform based on our testing. That greater scalability will lead to a reduction in servers when using server virtualization. Further, the ability to consolidate license servers, data collectors, and other components offer additional consolidation savings. All of this is in addition to the deployment, support and high availability savings possible with server virtualization.
Edit #2: I have received a few emails asking to see the slides I created for the non-technical audience of business leaders. You can find the presentation "The Buzz on Virtualization" here. This is a very high level overview. One technical person told me it was so high level his grandmother could understand it (I do not think he meant that as a compliment ... 
). It did work very well for the audience where I presented it. I like to experiment a great deal with slide design and you can see that in this deck.
XenApp enables IT organizations to reduce the costs of delivering applications by centralizing management, security and control of apps and data. Application virtualization technology provides a flexible application delivery system that can select the best method to deliver an application dynamically, based on the user, application and network.
This next embedded presentation digs down much deeper into the application virtualization technology included in Citrix XenApp 5.0 .
(click here to see the presentation in full screen)
You can download the Delivery and Streaming Best Practices document here and the Office 2007 Profiling document here. The Administrator FAQ is here and you can find a Troubleshooting document here.
You can download a complete virtual appliance of Citrix XenApp 4.5 at this link.
UPDATE: You can see the second post (and presentation) in this series at this link.
The XenServer posts with technical presentations embedded (here and here) have been very popular. This next presentation dives down into the architecture and functioning of XenDesktop.
This presentation does have several slide notes that provide additional detail. You can view the slide notes here
Frank Anderson on the XenDesktop team has created a few screencasts covering the features of XenDesktop. You can watch his short screencast covering the provisioning and lifecycle management features of XenDesktop here. Frank's screencast on user experience is available here
Download the free XenDesktop Express Edition here
In a previous post, I embedded a presentation (thanks to SlideShare.net) that briefly reviewed the new server virtualization features of Citrix XenServer 5.
This next embedded presentation dives down into more technical detail for each of the new features.
You can find much more information at www.XenServer5.com.
You might have already seen the announcement of Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 Feature Pack 1 and its big features (SmartAuditor, EasyCall, Simplified licensing etc). This article is to talk about improvements that have not been highlighted in our marketing message but do have high value for some customers and partners.
1. SecureICA (128-bit encryption) for x64 platform
Our previous PS 64-bit release did not support this and we have now added support for this feature.
2. Client certificate support
The ICA Client now supports client side certificates. For e.g. if you configure Access Gateway to require SSL certificates then the client can present one during the SSL handshake. Jay has the details in his blog
3. Multi monitor enhancements
Several enhancements and fixes have been made e.g. dialog boxes and GINA windows don appear between the monitors, a primary monitor can be selected for application launch, a hot key is available to minimize a published desktop (useful when in full screen mode), supports shaped monitors by auto detecting the monitor configuration, a desktop session can be resized so it can occupy the entire real estate etc.
4. Presentation Server SDK now includes SmartAccess extensions
Presentation Server SDK has been updated to allow enumeration of SmartAccess filter information for active sessions on Presentation Server. These filters are provided by Access Gateway as a result of policy evaluations which may include endpoint analysis results. This is great way for partners to extend our SmartAccess functionality.
5. Icon support for WI PN Agent
WI and PN Agent now support true application icons (including 16x16, 32x32 and 48x48 size icons) and hence icons will now look original (as opposed to being stretched or shrunk). We do cache these icons on the client and hence you will not see any increase in network traffic (except for a very small increase the first time a user launches the new client from a new device)
6. Large application profiling support for application streaming
Microsoft CAB file has the limitation that each CAB cannot be more than 2 GB in size, and cannot have more than 64,000 number of files in it. This puts limits on large application profiling. We have now worked around this limitation so that extremely large applications can be profiled through application streaming profiler.
7. Web Interface client detection wizard for enhanced end user usability
WI now does a much better job in bootstrapping a user when they are coming from a new device to access applications. This feature can be very useful when users are coming from locked down machines/browsers with high security settings as it can properly guide a user to getting to their application fast.
8. Support for DirectX/WPF applications
PS 4.5 Feature Pack 1 now supports WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) applications. Though there are currently not many WPF applications, many application vendors are embracing this platform for their next generation application development. This is our first step in supporting WPF applications (using server side software rendering) and please check out Derek's blog on what we are doing for the future
9. Windows Mobile 5 and ActiveSync support
This release now adds support for Windows Mobile 5 based smart phones and PDAs to sync data (application data, files, e-mail etc) with ActiveSync 4.x as a published application.
10. Updated PS Unix
Citrix Presentation Server for UNIX 4.0 now supports Solaris x86/x64 platform. This is in addition to our current support for Solaris SPARC, IBM AIX and HP-UX platforms. This new Solaris x86/x64 release contains several enhancements since the initial release of PS for UNIX 4.0 and is available to all customers current on Subscription Advantage. You can log into mycitrix and get the bits from the download section.
Both IBM and HP ship and fully support Solaris on their x86/x64 server lines so customer options are not restricted to Sun Microsystems own x86/x64 servers when delivering solutions with Citrix Presentation Server for UNIX 4.0. Sun Microsystems also provides Solaris only support options for delivering solutions on x86/x64 servers from other manufacturers.
The PS UNIX platform support page has the details.
Additionally, Presentation Server 4.5 Feature Pack 1 contains an updated PS 4.0 UNIX release (all platforms) with the latest updates and ability to consume Platinum licenses.