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I posted the first 3 videos for the Workflow Studio 2.0 video tutorial series on CitrixTV:
- Getting Started with Workflow Studio 2.0
- Workflow Studio 2.0 Architecture and Components
- Installing and Configuring Workflow Studio 2.0
You can access the series and watch them all in a playlist format from here:
http://www.citrix.com/tv/series/109
I plan to add some more video tutorials to this series and also plan to do a series that explores the new features in 2.0 specifically. Let me know what you think and what other topics you want me to cover...
We recently challenged people to create the next GoToMeeting commercial. We received a total of 44 entries for the contest and narrowed them down to the five best. The winner will receive $30,000.
A Citrix Online group had a great time picking the top 5 entries from the many clever funny submissions received, and are now opening it up to you. Check out www.gotomeetingtv.com to view the 5 top entries and vote for your favorite. (You have to register to vote.)
Cast a 5-star vote for your favorite of the five semifinalists. The video that receives the most votes will be the winner. The last day to vote is July 31, 2009 - so get your vote in today!
In Part 1, Steve Umbehocker reviewed the installation of the StorageLink component of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V. In this next installment, Steve reviews the initial configuration of StorageLink after it has been installed.
The Enterprise Edition includes the full version of StorageLink, Dynamic Provisioning Services for Server Operating Systems, and complete WorkFlow Orchestration.
The Platinum Edition of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V adds in Lab Manager to provide a complete cost effective virtual lab solution, and Stage Manager to automate the process of migrating newly tested and verified configurations from the virtual lab directly into production. You can download a evaluation copy of the Platinum Edition of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V at http://www.citrix.com/ehv.
Express Edition Download
http://www.citrix.com/ehvexpress
StorageLink Deep Dive Webinar - http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/barryf/2009/04/13/StorageLink+-+Essentials+for+Hyper-V+Deep+Dive+Webinar
StorageLink Demo Videos
http://www.citrix.com/ehv
StorageLink Overview - http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/barryf/2009/02/23/StorageLink+in+Essentials+for+Hyper-V
Provisoning Services Overview - http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/barryf/2009/03/20/Provisioning+for+Hyper-V+with+Citrix+Essentials
Lab Manager Overview - http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/barryf/2009/03/19/Essentials+for+Hyper-V+with+Lab+Management
StorageLink Install Install Guide - http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX120789
StorageLink User Guide - http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX120791
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Launched just in time for Synergy, Citrix TV is the newest Web site offering from Citrix. Access a variety of videos regarding Citrix products, announcements, demos, tips, and troubleshooting. See some familiar faces along with some new ones and hear what they have to say about Citrix products.
Weren't able to make it to Synergy? Check out the Synergy Channel and see the announcements, interviews and keynotes. Don't miss out on the great discussions.
Find content you are looking for using Channels, Filters, Search, Tags, and Related Videos. Rate, comment on, and share any of the videos displayed. New videos are always being added, so be sure to check back often and let us know what you think!
Have you seen the error "You have chosen not to trust XXX Server CA, the issuer of the server's security certificate (SSL error 61)." on Citrix Linux Plugin for XenApp (formerly known as ICA client)? It may be because the certificate authority from whom you get your server certificate is not trusted by your client.
I've got questions from users about this error. And I've made a request to product team to mitigate this issue. Please see comments from my earlier blog.
There are articles you can find on the Internet which describe a solution. However some users found videos more helpful than text only version. So I decided to create a video version of it.
Citrix online group released a beta version of new product called GoView this week.
Here is my first look at this product. I would like to share a short demo recording I created using GoView and some tips and tricks I learned from this first try.
Install:
I signed up at goview.com web site
I got it up and running with a few clicks and under a minute. Time may vary depending on your network and compute speed.
Record my first screen cast:
I didn't have to read any document and I was able to create my first test screen cast without any trouble. And the performance is good. Please see my test recording.
Things I like and things that differentiate this product:
- Simplicity. I've used other similar products. This product doesn't have all the bells and whistles. But it is definitely the simplest and easiest one to use I've seen.
- Video is uploaded while I am recording. I don't have to perform an additional upload step.
- Ability to protect shared video with a password.
- Easy and intuitive editing tool to cut out the unwanted portion. The tool also allows a slide show to be inserted which is useful for transition into another sequence.
- Ability to download your recordings as MPEG-4 files.
Things I would like to see added:
- Ability to embed views in my blog
- Ability to zoom in and out of an area while recording.
I was told that the GoView product team has these features on their list for future development consideration already.
Additional demo videos that may be helpful:
These videos include audios.
Tips and Tricks:
- If you use dual monitors, you may want to move your desktop icons and windows task bar to your secondary monitor, so that your primary monitor has a clean background for recording.
- You can pause recording when you need to prepare the screen for the next sequence and resume when you are ready.
Your turn:
GoView is free during the beta testing. Give it a try yourself at http://goview.com
Send your feedback via the feedback link on help page. I got my response back in an hour. The team is listening.
I'd love to hear your experience and see your own cool demos.
Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
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Yesterday Citrix announced the newest Citrix product that builds on top of the Microsoft Windows Server platform - Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V. Essentials for Hyper-V has four primary components -
- Automated lab management enables Hyper-V customers to develop, test and deliver applications faster by automating and simplifying the entire virtual machine lifecycle, including movement across virtualization platforms.
- Advanced storage integration using Citrix StorageLink™ technology makes it easy for Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center customers to fully leverage all the native power of their existing array-based storage systems.
- Dynamic provisioning services lets customers centrally manage a common set of master images which can be streamed on-demand into Hyper-V virtual machines or physical servers.
- Hypervisor interoperability makes it easy for customers to manage virtual machines across heterogeneous Hyper-V and XenServer environments.
This short video below by Peter Blum reviews the Advanced StorageLink capability built into Essentials with Hyper-V.
I will post more videos and info on Essentials from Hyper-V from VMWorld Europe.
A key strategic concept that guides the Citrix Multimedia Virtualization Initiative (project Apollo) is "SmartRendering". This term describes the intelligent, automated combination of server-side and client-side rendering of graphics and media streams. SmartRendering considers such factors as the attributes of the application, the capabilities of the client and the server, and the characteristics of the network, to ensure an optimal user experience and the most efficient use of computing resources.
Many exciting new developments lie ahead as we extend SmartRendering to how we will deliver Aero desktops (introduced in Vista and enhanced in Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 release with "Aero Peek"), next generation applications (such as data visualization applications built on Windows Presentation Foundation), Flash videos (including HD videos rendered with Adobe's H.264 codec) and 3D professional graphics (OpenGL and DirectX).
Although SmartRendering is a technology with lots of innovation and evolution still to come, it already plays an important part in how XenApp and XenDesktop deliver multimedia/graphics content in our currently shipping releases. Our software continually monitors the network and dynamically adjusts how it sends data to the client. And it constantly makes decisions about how best to render the GDI/GDI+ graphics used in most applications today. Often, SmartRendering will send GDI commands over the wire to be rendered by the graphics processor (GPU) on the client device, offloading the server to maximize scalability. In other cases, SmartRendering will determine that it is more efficient to render the graphics on the server and send a compressed bitmap image over the wire, with SuperCaching to eliminate redundant transmissions.
SpeedScreen Multimedia Acceleration, based on Citrix's RAVE technology and included with XenApp since Presentation Server 3.0 (introduced in 2004), also employs SmartRendering. If the user's device is capable of decoding a video using its own resources, SpeedScreen Multimedia Acceleration leverages the client's CPU and the appropriate codec, with automatic fallback to server-side rendering when needed. The result is a high definition user experience and outstanding server scalability. Very soon, you'll see this feature in XenDesktop, too, and supported by our Linux plugin (client) for both XenApp and XenDesktop.
Other vendors are starting to implement similar techniques. Wyse offers TCX Multimedia and has announced its Collaborative Processing Architecture which "intelligently divides the workload between the server and client, reducing the need for larger servers". And Microsoft's upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2 release will deliver multimedia content "by redirecting multimedia files and streams so that audio and video content is sent in its original format from the server to the (Windows 7) client and rendered using the client's local media playback capabilities."
In an upcoming blog post, I plan to show you a video demonstration of a new SmartRendering capability now under development at Citrix that leverages a DirectX 9 or better graphics processor on the endpoint for client-side rendering of the full Aero desktop experience. And it doesn't require Vista or Windows 7 on the user's device. So stay tuned because SmartRendering is going to get even more powerful!
Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization
I've been working on the ICA on iPhone project recently and I had to move a new build from my development machine to my test server frequently. At first I tried RDP. But it is painfully slow to copy my binary to the test server for me. Then I tried ICA and it worked much better. The experience made me appreciate the efficiency of ICA more.
Seeing is believing, I've captured my experience in a video. If you use client drive mapping, you might be interested in checking out this video.
To start with, here is a short demo video of how to install AutoCAD Map3D 2009 on XenApp I created.
Would you rather watch a short instruction video than reading pages of instructions? Now you can. I've been working with Citrix support team to enhance the existing knowledge base web site with relevant videos.
Here is one example. We recently linked a "CitrixTip" video from our Citrix tip video site with the relevant knowledge base article. You can find the video link in the summary section of the knowledge base article. This video shows how to gather debug trace on Citrix XenApp servers.
Many thanks to the colleagues from our knowledge center team to make this happen.
James Millington has made a new video screencast on UTipu that outlines the changes in the user interface for EdgeSight 5. Watch the five minute screencast with James below.
Paul Venezia, senior contributing editor of the InfoWorld Test Center, recently posted a review of Citrix XenDesktop
. Paul writes "The future is bright for VDI and, thus, for XenDesktop". He goes on to say "Citrix has married VDI to its existing stable of application and desktop delivery mechanisms, and it continues to leverage the stellar ICA protocol to assist in speed, user experience, and manageability" (emphasis mine).
The review evaluates Citrix XenDesktop on five categories - Management, Performance, Scalability, Setup and Value. Overall, Paul rates XenDesktop solution as "Very Good".
Read Paul's full review 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
Simon Crosby, CTO of the Citrix VMD Division, did an interview with Brian Ducharme of Virtual Strategy Magazine during VMWorld to review the Citrix announcements during the event.
Here are the Citrix press releases from the event -
Citrix Unveils Cloud Computing Strategy and Product Line
Citrix and Marathon Partner to Bring World Class High Availability and Fault Tolerance to Citrix XenServer
XenServer 5 Changes the Game in Server Virtualization with Unprecedented Reliability, Openness and Ease-of-Use
(click the link to play - there is a current issue with embedding videos)
Robin Brandl (Microsoft Technology Evangelist for Citrix) was interviewed by Joey Snow of Technet Edge during the Microsoft getVirtualnow event in Bellevue, WA.
(click to play)
Remember the impressive demo that David Stone gave at Synergy in Houston showing how Citrix's RAVE technology is being adapted to improve the delivery of Adobe Flash content? Perhaps you caught the video on Synergy Underground. David showed a graphics-intensive 3D Flash animation of a shark and fish swimming in the ocean. It was far beyond the typical Flash animations found on corporate web pages yet the quality was "just like local". Since then, the Apollo Multimedia Virtualization team has continued to make excellent progress enhancing SpeedScreen Flash Acceleration with our RAVE technology. I met with Dave recently and we recorded this video to show how RAVE can deliver a high definition Flash movie complete with HD audio. The user experience is amazing and server CPU consumption is extremely low. Sorry, no dates have yet been announced for beta trials or general availability. But I think you'll be amazed at what the Apollo team has already achieved. RAVE (Remote Audio & Video Extension) is a strategic technology for Citrix and a key piece of our SmartRendering vision - the intelligent combination of server-side and client-side rendering based on factors such as the particulars of the application, the capabilities of the client and the server, and the characteristics of the network connection. RAVE is already used in XenApp's SpeedScreen Multimedia Acceleration feature, which is now being ported to XenDesktop, to deliver high quality video and audio from hosted media players based on DirectShow, DMO or Media Foundation technology. Many customers have been asking Citrix to enhance SpeedScreen Flash Acceleration with RAVE to improve the delivery of Flash-based eLearning applications and corporate communications videos. So take a look and let us know what you think. How will this technology help your organization? What are your most important "use cases" for delivering Flash content using XenApp or XenDesktop?
Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization
The NY Times published an interesting front page article (Aug 9) and online post discussing how NBC attempted to block web sites hosting video clips and live feeds of the Olympic Games opening ceremonies in the United States. According to the Times article NBC "sent frantic requests" to web sites asking them to remove videos and feeds of the Olympic ceremonies - amounting to a game of "digital whack-a-mole". Web sites including YouTube (Google) and Justin.tv pulled down clips, but could not keep up with users who traded links via Blogs and Twitter to stay ahead of NBC. NBC was attempting to protect its' TV broadcast coverage of the ceremonies which were tape delayed and presented in the USA during the evening hours on Friday August 8, a full 12 hours after the opening ceremonies actually occurred.
So why is this interesting for a Citrix marketing type like me? This interests me because NBC had an opportunity to engage its user community - and didn't. User communities are a fundamental component of today's and presumably tomorrow's web, and at Citrix we are fortunate to have a long-standing and vibrant user community that Citrix needs to engage with and make successful. Citrix has a renewed focus and commitment to make our community more successful via the newly re-designed and enhanced Citrix Communities site. We care about our users and our community and are investing to help make our community successful.
Is there more to this NBC video thing beyond the notion that traditional media outlets like NBC apparently still don't get the net, or that video has finally arrived on the net? NBC is posting thousands of hours of its Olympic Games coverage online, using Microsoft® Silverlight™ technology, so they do get the net, or do they? (this Silverlight aspect is a topic for another blog - can you say DRM!) NBC's decision not to live stream coverage of the opening ceremonies might be considered somewhat odd. NBC is obviously working to manage access to its Olympic video footage in an attempt to maximize its audience so as to charge higher advertising rates. This all makes sense - old school sense - or rather cents!
I'm sensing NBC has missed a glorious opportunity to engage its community who could have supplied content snips from their perspective, content that could have extended the NBC viewpoint. This user supplied content could have been a great complement to live streaming feeds of NBC's "official" Olympic games opening coverage - if NBC had in fact supplied a live internet feed. They have the infrastructure -see myNBC.com. My searches on myNBC.com turned up 2 Olympic Games clips, both of which returned "the requested video is not available" message"...
NBC blew a significant opportunity to begin re-inventing themselves to be more than just a source of content created in-house and to begin engaging and fostering a user community of associate content providers. Many news outlets, CNN, Fox News are attempting to leverage user supplied content to support their official coverage - NBC missed the opportunity to build their community and leverage the Olympics.
I spent most of the week before last at Synergy in Houston, co-presenting a breakout session on XenDesktop architecture, and in a number of customer and partner meetings. Most of the time, however, I demo-ed XenDesktop to the public in the technology lab - or at least, that was the plan.
In reality, a lot of the time I actually ended up using pen and paper to sketch out XenDesktop, and how the various components that make up this product work together to deliver an end-to-end desktop virtualization story. Once the basic ideas behind XenDesktop got across, it was a lot easier to walk through the UI and demo the product. The other Citrites at the XenDesktop booths had exactly the same experience of typically setting up the scene before delving into details.
So I thought I'd try recording what I did in Houston as a little video - it's a bit rough round the edges, and it doesn't cover the full gamut of what XenDesktop can do (it doesn't talk about how you can assign individual virtual desktops to users, for instance), but it'll help explain some of the principles and ideas behind XenDesktop, and perhaps also shows where and how it differs from other VDI solutions.
PS: Sorry for my handwriting - it's never been very good...
PPS: XenDesktop (including the free Express edition) is now available for download from mycitrix.com
As part of their coverage of Citrix Synergy,Virtual Strategy Magazinerecorded a video interview with Simon Crosby, the CTO of our VMD division, at Citrix Synergy. In this interview Simon talks about our virtualization products Citrix XenDesktop, XenServer and about great partners like Marathon Technologies.
Thanks to VSM for the link back to the Synergy Underground site as well.