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Here is part three of the Citrix Ready Solution of the Year Finalists.
Congratulations IGEL on being named one of six Citrix Ready Solution of the Year finalist. Here is what they had to say when they were told they were a finalist:
"We're extremely honored to be named a finalist for this year's Citrix Ready Solution of the Year Award. With our unique Universal Desktop thin client design, we aim to provide Citrix users with a fantastic user experience, including fast roll outs, easy remote management, bullet proof security and the ability to deliver applications to any location." -- Florian Spatz, Product Marketing Manager, IGEL Technology
IGEL has a number of innovative solutions ranging from the Citrix Password Manager(tm) Hot Desktop feature to our new XenDesktop Appliance Mode, which transforms an IGEL Universal Desktop into a Citrix XenDesktop appliance with the simple click of a mouse. Click here to learn more.
Do you use IGEL with Citrix? Let us know...
The winner will be announced at our Citrix Summit and Synergy event May 3-7 at the MGM Grand.
This is the second of my six part series on the Solution of the Year finalists.
Congratulations to visionapp for being named one of six Citrix Ready Solution of the Year finalists. Here is what Chuck Fritz and Paul Ardoin had to say about their nomination:
"The entire visionapp team is proud of their accomplishments working with Citrix, Citrix partners, and Citrix customers -- and we're glad that our hard work has paid off with the recognition as a Citrix Ready Solution of the Year finalist." --Chuck Fritz, President and CEO, visionapp North America
"I was thrilled to hear that we were a Citrix Ready Solution of the Year finalist. I'm excited about the work our engineers have done with compatibility with the new Citrix XenApp 5.0 and Provisioning Server, and I'm really happy with some of our customer wins where we've been able to keep Citrix customers happy with their entire infrastructure. I'm excited to come to Synergy and continue the success our products have had together!" --Paul Ardoin, Director of Marketing, visionapp North America
visionapp specializes in the design, implementation and operation of application delivery infrastructure and portal solutions based on virtualization and streaming technologies from Microsoft and Citrix. Click here to learn more.
How do you use visionapp with Citrix? Send us your comments...
p.s. Don't forget, the winner will be announced at our Citrix Summit and Synergy event May 3-7 at the MGM Grand.
This is the first of my 6 part blog series highlighting the Citrix Ready Solution of the Year finalists. The winner will be announced at our Citrix Summt and Synergy event May 3-7 at the MGM Grand.
Please join me in congratulating XTS for being named one of six finalists for the Citrix Ready Solution of the Year Award. When we told Eric Speigel, CEO of XTS they were a finalist he was thrilled. Here is what he had to say about their nomination:
"We are more than excited to be selected as a finalist for the Citrix Ready Solution of the Year Award. This selection highlights the value of our Citrix Ready partnership and demonstrates the value we bring to our shared customers."
XTS is the leading provider of enterprise-class analytics software for advanced planning and management of Citrix and other virtualization environments. They have a unique, non-intrusive data warehouse architecture provides visibility into usage history, configuration properties and Citrix policies for Citrix XenApp farms. Click here to learn more.
Do you use XTS with Citrix? Let us know....
Congratulations to the Citrix Ready Solution of the Year finalists! The Citrix Ready team is pleased to announce this year finalists:
The finalists were chosen based on the following criteria:
- Impact on Citrix's Business
- Commitment to the Citrix Relationship
- Customer Satisfaction
- Channel and Field Commitment
- Marketing Commitment
The winner will be announced at:
May 4-7, 2009
MGM Grand Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada
Over the next few days we will blog about each of the Citrix Ready Solution of the Year finalists. Make sure you come back to learn more on why these partners were chosen as the finalists.
HP just announced their next generation G6 ProLiant and BladeSystem servers powered by Intel Xeon 5500 (Nehalem) processors. My engineering friends suggested that the new Hyper Threading Technology in the 5500 processors is worth reading up on ... see the link in Pat Gelsinger's blog post for more on this front. Previously we talked about HP testing, and new performance characterization work just completed by HP indicates that a 2P HP BL460c G6 server equipped with the Intel Xeon X5570 can provide optimal support for up to 402 users when running HP's most aggressive test workload in a 64-bit HP Server Based Computing environment. The HP test results demonstrated that Hyper-Threading Technology was able to enhance performance by 41%, and that Nehalem provides a 2x performance improvement over the previous platform. Get all the details for yourself in the HP paper here. This BL460c G6 paper is the latest in HP's extensive library of performance characterization papers covering XenApp and XenServer with HP servers.
The HP G6 product release includes six new HP ProLiant servers certified with the new free Citrix XenServer. XenServer is certified on the: HP ProLiant BL490c G6, BL460c G6, DL380 G6, DL360 G6, ML370 G6, and the ML350 G6 models. This takes the total number of XenServer certified ProLiant models to 27!
Yup - HP now offers no less than 27 server platforms certified with XenServer!
Not-For-Resale products are offered to our Citrix Ready Technology and Citrix Ready members for testing, development, and demonstration purposes. As an added value, members are eligible to receive free and/or discounted NFRs.
| Citrix Technology Member |
Citrix Ready Core Members |
Citrix Ready Leaderships |
| 3 NFR allotment | 15 NFR allotments | 30 NFR allotments |
Additional Citrix Software NFRs are also available for purchase at a discounted rate.
Members are entitled to purchase discounted Citrix Hardware NFRs. Partners are eligible to order one (1) Hardware NFR product version per partner. Orders exceeding one (1) Hardware NFR product version per partner, or partners ordering additional Hardware NFR products who have received
previous Hardware NFR products, will follow an exception process and be reviewed on a case-by-case basis.
Accessing Allotted Software NFRs on MyCitrix.com site
To obtain NFR products please follow these steps:
1. Log in to http://www.citrix.com/MyCitrix
2. Go to My Tools and Choose a Toolbox
3. Select Partner Use Licenses from the menu
4. Click on the button "Get Software"
5. Select the product from the drop-down list
6. Select the Language
7. Click on Retrieve New Serial Numbers
- Click on the name of the product and this will reveal the serial numbers
- Copy the serial numbers and go to Choose a Toolbox
8. Select Activation System/Manage Licenses
9. From the drop-down select Activate/Allocate and paste the copied serial number in the space provided
10.Follow the instructions on the screen.
If you are not a Citrix Ready Partner and if you want to get more information about the program then you can learn more on how to become a partner at following URL
http://www.citrix.com/Citrixreadyinfo
If you are a developer just looking to try out XenApp/XenDesktop for developement/integration purpose you can download developer/eval licenses from following URL
Citrix and Wyse are working together to meet end-user demands. The Wyse Viance desktop appliance is purpose-built to work in concert with the delivery capabilities of Citrix XenDesktop. Together, this joint solution provides a virtual desktop that offers the best user experience, simplest administration, lowest cost of ownership, as well as a significantly lower environmental impact.
To learn more, attend the upcoming live webinar with Citrix, Wyse, and ESG. Join ESG's leading virtualization analyst Mark Bowker as he discusses desktop virtualization's impact on the endpoint device and how user experience is closely tied to the success of desktop virtualization deployments.
By attending this webinar you will discover how you can benefit from XenDesktop and the out-of-the box Wyse Viance solution by:
• Reducing hardware and software costs by 40%
• Reducing IT operations costs by 30%
• Reducing worker downtime by almost 90%
• Increasing staff productivity up to 80%
Webinar Details:
Deliver Desktop Virtualization with Thin Clients
Date: March 25, 2009
Time: 8:00 am PST, 11:00 am EST, 4:00 pm GMT
Duration: 60 minutes
Speakers: Mark Bowker, Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group
Calvin Hsu, Director, XenDesktop Product Marketing, Citrix Systems
Hector Angulo, Product Manager, Wyse Viance Series, Wyse Technology
Register now at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/747643175.
Citrix Ready Members,
Do you want your solution to get highlighted during Citrix Synergy? The Citrix Ready Solution of the Year Nomination form is NOW available.
The annual Citrix Ready Solution of the Year Award recognizes the Citrix Ready member that best excels in delivering solutions complementary to Citrix. This exclusive award is a unique opportunity for Citrix Ready members to showcase their solutions and to benefit from increased recognition within the Citrix channel eco-systems. This year the winner will be announced at our upcoming Synergy event May 3-7, 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The deadline for nominations is April 6, 2009. If you have any questions related to the nomination process please email us at citrixready AT citrix.com.
Here is the list of partner who have won the award in the past
Enteo (now called FrontRange Solutions Inc.) (The award was know as Solution of the Year Award at that time)
Browse all Citrix Ready Product by Enteo
Browse all Citrix Ready Product by Wyse
Browse all Citrix Ready Product by NetApp
Thank you,
Citrix Ready Team
http://www.citrix.com/citrixready
How can you get an even better return on your XenApp investment? Virtualize it with Citrix XenServerTM. Then fortify it with Marathon everRun®. Fault tolerance for XenServer virtualization is the most cost-effective way to introduce the highest degree of application resiliency for your most mission-critical XenApp deployments.
Attend the upcoming Citrix and Marathon live webinar to learn how virtualizing Citrix XenApp with Citrix XenServer helps you:
• Lower operating expenses by consolidating XenApp servers
• Increase IT flexibility by provisioning XenApp across physical and virtual servers
• Enable zero-downtime maintenance with XenMotion live migration
You'll also discover how fortifying XenApp and XenServer with Marathon Technologies' everRun software give you the confidence to:
• Increase your SLAs for your most critical XenApp deployments
• Protect your Citrix License Server and Data Store from downtime with automated availability
Webinar Details:
Virtualize and Fortify XenApp for Lower Costs & Higher SLAs
Date: March 18, 2009
Time: 8:30 am PST, 11:30 am EST, 4:30 pm GMT
Duration: 60 minutes
Speakers: Sridhar Mullapudi, XenApp Sr. Product Manager, Citrix Systems
Peter Blum, XenServer Principal Technical Marketing Manager, Citrix Systems
Tom Reed, Sr. Solutions Architect, Marathon Technologies
Register now at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/587322586
Two years ago Citrix released developer licenses for Citrix XenApp. However I still see tons of requests for an eval license for trying out XenApp in support forums and community in general. The XenApp developer license gives a 2CCU license to evaluate XenApp for 12 months. It is a really good option to deploy a small lab for testing or build a XenApp environment for SDK development or testing but as Brian Madden mentioned in his blog while back this free edition of XenApp is not sufficient for "real" testing, but serious Citrix customers can still contact a reseller to get a 99-user, 90-day eval license. The 1 year developer license is also a good option for trying out XenApp in personal lab and getting Citrix certified. The developer licenses will work on XenApp 4.0, 4.5 and 5.0 servers.
Here is step by step process to get your own developer license.
Step 1: Sign up for a Free MyCitrix account
Step 2: Login to MyCitrix and select "Product Previews / Beta Releases - License Retrieval" from the "My Tools" widget.
Step 3: Select "Presentation Server Dev. Edition"
Step 4: Verify that you are assigned a license code and then Click Continue
Step 5: Search for a solution advisor or select "I cannot find my reseller" and continue.
Step 6: Verify the contact and address information
Step 7: Determine the hostname of License Server and click continue (Tip hostname is case sensitive)
Step 8: Retrieve and save your XenApp license.
If you are a hobbyist or geek like me who wants to try out XenApp server but don't want to install XenApp from scratch but want something quick. I have created XenApp Demo AMI (Amazon Machine Image) with a developer license and Chris Fleck has a video where he explains how to get your own XenApp Server in Amazon EC2 cloud in 15 minutes using the XenApp Demo AMI.
Sleeping on an airplane can be a challenge. Some folks use over the counter cold medicines to help fall asleep during airplane fights. Some people go straight for the designer pharmaceuticals! And there is the rare person that simply grabs one of those sketchy airplane pillows and voila - sleep ensues. I tend to like curling up with a nice marketing free, data rich, (graphs are the best) virtualization performance testing white paper! Assuming you still have budget for travel - on your next plane flight try reading one or more of the virtualization performance white papers linked below. Bet you can't finish one before cutting some zzzzz's! 
Kidding aside, HP publishes some awesome technical papers. HP is a long standing and strategic partner of ours and we value their commitment and investment in support of Citrix as evidenced by the performance characterization papers below. What's nice is these papers are pretty much marketing free. HP ProLiant Solution Engineering develops papers like these as part of their extensive and ongoing commitment to joint solution testing with Citrix. Whether you are traveling or not these papers are definitely worth a read.
Check out the ProLiant DL785 paper: XenServer performance overhead as low as 3%, and the ProLiant BL465 paper: XenServer performance overhead as low as 10%. So without further verbiage, here are the links:
- Virtualizing 64-bit workloads with XenServer and HP ProLiant DL785 G5
- Virtualizing 64-bit workloads with XenServer and HP ProLiant BL465 G5
- Virtualizing 64-bit workloads with Xenserver and HP ProLiant BL685 G5
- Virtualizing 64-bit workloads with XenServer on HP ProLiant BL680c G5
- Consolidating servers with 32-bit workloads - XenServer on HP ProLiant BL680c G5
Now where is that pillow!
As the Beatles so famously declared in 1967, we can all use the help of a good friend. From day one, Citrix has always had a strong partner community to ensure that we deliver as complete and robust a solution to our customers as possible. In fact, with over 2200 companies enrolled in the Citrix Technology Member Program more than 800 products from 150 companies verified as part of the Citrix Ready Program and nearly 1200 products in 8000 instances documented in the Citrix Ready Community Verified Program, I would say that we have reached a level of partnership that few companies in the industry can match.
However, that is not enough. It's easy to partner when the economy is good, but it's even more essential to pull together when times are tough. In that spirit, the Citrix Ready team held a webinar for our Citrix Ready partners yesterday (available for Citrix Ready Partners to replay here) to discuss important new changes made in the program that will elevate the value of the Citrix Ready program not only for our partners, but perhaps more importantly, for our customers and channel partners.
The Citrix Ready team is constantly in touch with our partners to ensure that we evolve the program to ensure that the program brings value to our partner community. While there are many ways to calculate the value of a program, the most basic way to quantify the program value is to assess the value of the benefits against the cost to participate in the program, more simply stated:
Value of Citrix Ready Program == Program Benefits / Cost of Program
Obviously the quantification of the numerator is subjective and will vary for each company participating in the program, how engaged they are in the program, how many benefits they take advantage of, etc. The denominator is clearly described in terms of the program fees. Therefore, to increase the value of the program, the job of the Citrix Ready team is pretty simple 
- Increase the value of the benefits without increasing the costs of the program.
That might be enough if times were good. However, they are not. As such, we challenged ourselves to see if we could really, really, find a way to pull together the partner community for the mutual benefits of our customers and channel partners. I am pleased to share with you that the team did just that and found a way to increase the benefits while decreasing the program costs by 1/3!
Yes, you read that correctly, more benefits at lower costs.
(For those of you that are following the math, we increased the numerator while decreasing the denominator thereby supercharging the value of the program!)
Specifically, we announced the following new Citrix Ready program benefits:
- Enhanced partner communication and collaboration via Citrix Ready Forums, Citrix Ready Blogs, Citrix Ready Newsletters and a Citrix Ready Steering Committee
- Increased participation in our channel program communication and events
- Deeper involvement with our products via quarterly technology roadmap seminar series and discounts on Citrix Education programs
- Extended marketing benefits that include education and inclusion in our "Key Play" go to market activities, customer newsletters and Citrix Communities such as the Community Verified site
In addition, all of these benefits are available via the web regardless of what geographic location or time zone the partner is located in, providing 24x7 access enabling our partners to take advantage of these benefits when it is convenient for them, not based on Citrix's availability.
While I doubt that Vicky, Tricia, Vishal and I will ever be confused with John, Paul, George and Ringo, we certainly aspire to uphold the spirit of those Beatles from 1967.
OK, actually it's 12.5 cents and it might take you a few minutes longer, but compared to the traditional methods of building/configuring servers the cost and time savings is dramatic. It is now possible to launch a pre-built XenApp image in the Amazon Web Service offering called EC2. The image includes XenApp 5.0 on Windows 2003 Server ready to run and is accessible as an Admin or user. Also included is the Citrix 2 CCU Developer license bundled into the image so you can be ready for test, dev, and demo's in minutes. In this demo image we have NOT included Secure Gateway or Access Gateway so we do not recommend this image for production environments. The actual minimum cost for EC2 with Windows Server is 12.5 cents per hour with no minimum or commitment, so you can actually run it for an hour, terminate the image and that's all you owe. In reality you will likely want to install apps, customize your image and run it for some length of time. It is also very easy to save your image after you have customized it and terminate the image so the EC2 charges stop. The associated S3 Storage cost is only 15 cents per Gig per month, again very cheap and easy. New VM instances can then be started from saved images at anytime. As you may know the magic that powers this service is based on the Xen Hypervisor and the business model that Amazon has put together makes this a very attractive solution for many scenario's, in this case starting with demos, test, dev, PoC's etc. Many thanks to Vishal Ganeriwala for putting this image together and leading the way for more to come.
Here is a VideoTip to walk you through every step ( also available at our VideoTip site http://citrix.utipu.com/app/tip/id/6236/ )
Step 1.
Go to http://aws.amazon.com and get an account with EC2
Step 2.
Go to http://console.aws.amazon.com to access the AWS management console
Step 3.
Setup Security Groups per the video
Step 4.
Find the publicly listed XenApp Amazon Image, Right click and Launch
( citrix-c3-lab/XenApp5.0_32bit_v1.4.manifest.xml )
Step 5.
Enter the IP address provided into your browser http://xx.yy.zz.tt; and you are ready to go !
( ID: administrator, PW: Citrix123, Domain: CTXSLic1 )
Tip : When saving " Bundling " your AMI image remember to register it so you can relaunch it.
| Do you plan to get your own XenApp Server in the Cloud ? | Choose |
|---|---|
| If it's really this cheap and easy, I am definitely going to try it. |  |
| No, I don't trust the cloud for anything .. | |
First the thanks!
As we roll into the Thanksgiving week in the US, I thought I would give a quick shout out of thanks to all of you that have participated in the Citrix Ready Community Verified site. Verifications are coming in faster than we can keep up with them (which was, after all, the whole idea in the first place). As of this morning, we have well over 1,000 applications and products verified by customers and partners as "Citrix Ready", backed by more than 7,000 verifications... more than 500 were added this week alone, and it's only Wednesday!
I'm assuming that you have all seen the Citrix Ready Community Verified site and you know it rocks... not because of anything we've done, but because it's created, owned and maintained by YOU; if not don't just take my word on it, check out Chris' blog, or Rene Vester's two blogs, here and here, or even Brian Madden's review, ...or of course, the site itself!
By many standards, the site has proven to be an overwhelming success. We launched it at Citrix Summit on October 25 this year with 600 Applications and 500 Community Verifications. In the month since launch, these numbers have gone through the roof with no end in sight. In fact, I am already hearing of cases where the Citrix Ready Community Verified site has encouraged customers to virtualize more apps, helped channel partners answer customer & prospect questions more quickly and technology partners who have submitted apps (theirs as well as from other vendors).
Citrix IT has even taken up the challenge by starting to validate all the products and applications we use internally in our IT environment. I challenge all of you reading this to verify via the "voting" function all apps and other products you are using via XenApp, XenDesktop, XenServer and NetScaler!
May I have another? Or more appropriately, may we give you another?
The Citrix Ready Community Verified site is a great example of how a community can share small bits of information that doesn't impose a tax on the submitter (the apps are already deployed, submitters are just telling us they have already completed the work)... taking full advantage of the network effect to drive overall benefit.
So the question that I have for all of you, is what can we do next? The Citrix Ready Community Verified site is addressing a common question around product verification with Citrix products that has been around literally since the first release of WinFrame. Are there other longstanding questions, issues, etc that seem difficult to solve as an individual customer, SE, channel partner, technology partner or Citrix employee, that we as a community can attack?
My team and I are very interested in your feedback and would welcome the opportunity to help.
Please feel free to comment on this blog, or send an email to me at john.fanelli@citrix.com