The new Xen Desktop will have an edition that includes three components - The Broker, XenServer, and Citrix Provisioning Server. Citrix Provisioning Server (formerly known as Ardence OS Streaming) often confuses people when they first hear about it. OS Streaming can be a difficult concept to grasp for many people at first. Once you do finally see the light, your jaw tends to drop as your eyes open wide. This video on YouTube is definitely a jaw dropper -

I heard this from a friend that this video was a huge hit at Microsoft Tech Ed in Orlando a few months ago. Justin Zarb blogged about it on Technet.com .

This video has been around for a while, so many of you may have already seen it.   You may not have seen this next video. This video demonstrates the high availability option for Citrix Provisioning Server.

Citrix Provisioning Server is a key component of the upcoming Citrix XenDesktop release. There will be an edition of XenDesktop that includes both Provisioning Server and the XenServer hypervisor to provide a complete solution for desktop virtulization.

If you missed iForum 2007, there was a great demo of Provisioning Server at the keynote. You can watch the demo with Mark Templeton and Pete Downing here .

In this video, Pete Downing first takes two CPS 4.0 Servers and instantly upgrades them to CPS 4.5 (while removing the local hard drives). Next, Pete will drag and drop provision 9 CPS Servers, 11 IIS Servers, 5 SAP Servers and 5 Microsoft SQL Servers (all diskless) in a matter of minutes. For his finale, Pete then streams out the XenServer Enterprise hypervisor to all 30 servers and brings up all the OS images as virtual machines. Now that is OS Streaming Gone Wild!

BTW, if you missed the "Jellied Cat" video that Mark T. played during the keynote, here it is.

How long before we have jellied cat cars? <grin>

I am looking for more content specifically for Provisioning Server, so stay tuned.

UPDATE: Some additional third party content on Provisioning Server from the comments (Special Thanks to Wilco)-

Performance of CPS server based on Citrix Provisioning Server (http://sbc.vanbragt.net/mambo/white-papers/performance-of-cps-based-on-citrix-provisioning-server.html)

Explanation how tow run a CPS with Ardence OS Streaming

http://sbc.vanbragt.net/mambo/white-papers/running-citrix-presentation-server-with-ardence-os-streaming.html

Beside I also have a review of the product it self:

http://sbc.vanbragt.net/mambo/deployment/ardence-os-streaming-4.html

Also take a look at http://www.virtuall.nl/videos/Ardence/&nbsp;where Ruben Spruijt published some nice demo video's of the product.

One more link I have come across - http://www.Ardenceguru.com

Update2: One more link. Here is a presentation on the old Ardenc site that covers how Provisioning Server works with Citrix Presentation Server.

Add this blog to Technorati Favorites

I'm back from my 7-day Eastern Caribbean cruise and of course the first thing on my mind is my Multimedia Virtualization blog! We've just migrated the Citrix blog site to an updated system so I had a few transitional issues to work through, but now I'm ready to share with you Part 2 of my series on optimizing Adobe Flash performance on Citrix Presentation Server. (Click here to read Part 1.)

There's definitely more to optimizing Adobe Flash than configuring SpeedScreen Flash Acceleration ("SpeedFlash") and making sure you have any required hotfixes to handle newer versions of Flash. One of the features of Presentation Server that can have a very substantial positive impact on Flash performance (animations and video) is Queuing & Tossing. This feature shows up in the management console as "Discard queued images which are replaced by other images" or "Discard redundant graphics operations", depending on which version of Presentation Server you're running.

The Queuing & Tossing feature of Thinwire briefly queues GDI draw commands and, before sending them over ICA, inspects the stack in reverse order (LIFO) to allow tossing of obsolete commands (those which have been overwritten by subsequent commands). The queuing period is short enough (30ms) that it doesn't degrade the responsiveness of the application; in fact, performance is significantly improved because draw commands that are logically redundant are discarded.

The tossing algorithm was enhanced in Presentation Server 4.5 (Ohio) to look for more graphics constructs. The tossing algorithm now uses a 1-bit-per-pixel map of the session screen. And it can detect complete self-contained 'frames'. As a result, Thinwire will either send the entire frame to the client as a self-contained entity or toss it completely. These improvements to the tossing algorithm further reduce the amount of data that needs to be sent over the wire. Along with reduced network bandwidth consumption, network efficiency (data bytes per frame) is increased. And the user experience is better because the entire frame gets updated at once rather than in pieces.

So, just how big a difference does all of this make? I recently spoke with one of our engineers who has been taking performance measurements with Flash videos. In his testing, he found that enabling Queuing & Tossing reduced bandwidth consumption by more than 3 times!

In addition to the new framing behavior of Queuing & Tossing in PS 4.5, just-in-time output behavior has further improved Flash performance. Flash video playback with PS 4.5 is noticeably smoother. And CPU consumption is lower, which increases server scalability (number of simultaneous Flash users per server).

There's still quite a bit more to tell you about Adobe Flash performance optimization, so stay tuned for my next installment on this topic.

Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization